[ Wei Ying, like tide breaking in frothing effervescence, exhausting himself between quiet trades of words like maiden's knives, short and quick and their stab bloodied. Lotus-like, he withers with the peals and petals of his chatter pale beside him, testament to forlorn beauty.
The inn room does not suit them: sterile, it reeks of the throwaway practicalities of service, past pleasure. Lan Wangji requires no privileges his hands cannot deliver — this, the jingshi taught. Bathing water can be brought in tub and barrels, food procured alongside the gentle meanderings of a passing scholar, visiting the library domes, or an attendant, lent purpose. Wangji's possessions are extensions of his person, defined by the day's work: blood stains of friendly cinnabar jagged on strips of culled cotton, to spare blanched parchment. Lop-sided, the sophisticated stretches of costly silver worked in mirror glass, or coarser binds of polished brass, to practise his curse work. His books, his weapons, his finery — the packaging of Hanguang-Jun, rank preceding the person.
He did not know until he travelled alongside Wei Ying, who wears the scent of burned chestnut and home as he passes, how deeply Lan Wangji has grown summarily infected with wanderlust for the familiar.
Qingshan echoes him, cries plangent and crystalline, when the inn's maid delivers his bathing water and Wangji remembers to reward him with the flesh-pinkening rites of his ablution. Each limb stretched, each bone stroked, back and front and then the dip of him, like an ocean pearl, to bask in the brisk and happy dance of flailing arms and kicking feet, and half of his basin's water tumbled around him. If Lan Wangji should wear the better part of his son's rose and hyacinth salts, complimentary, as if Qingshan were but a visiting madam of a lesser clan — well, Lan Wangji has shrouded himself in half of the burrow's gravelly dark, already.
After, he retrieves the child, dresses him in only the necessities of his lower half, to enjoy the licking heat that diffuses in their quarters, sputtered in thin-smoke wisps by braziers. In his arms, Qingshan settles — further, when Lan Wangji resorts to the night's second weapon, the cup of milk carefully cradled against the child's mouth. He eats a peasant's fill, a starved man's. More than your three bowls of rice, Wangji does not not warn, because the particulars of precepts do not apply to those yet unable to whisper them alive.
He means to pass to child to the waiting bed, but stills in his step, hovered by Wei Ying, and remembers, the instinct to hide Sizhui beneath rabbits — and another, now to bury Wei Ying, curled and sweet, under children. Look at him, Qingshan's spider-lashed and wary blinks, and find an accomplice. Wangji nods to seal their pact, and carefully descends him by his father — watches Qingshan's majestic crawl over his rabbit friend, to land perilously flattened atop Wei Ying's hip. Ah. ]
Does he.
[ The lie betrays itself, his quirked brow notes, just as Lan Wangji dips down to occupy the edge of Wei Ying's seating, like a maiden attendant waiting to serve the master's cup or his wine, wasting trinkets of touch and lazy flows of qi when he passes a hand over the rabbit. Animal-like once more, returned to his nature. Long-eared, leathery nose, jittery paws. It shivers, when Wangji's touch first lands, when their energy streams bide their time to coordinate. Then, the lessening of its breath into quiet, soft sleep, nestled against Wei Ying. Heal, then. Heal, both of them, together. ]
You speak as we do when you tire.
[ With the stilted, rough-edged formality of the Gusu Lan dialect, chirped but unable to prosper the hope of further conversation. An empty observation, but Wei Ying's manhandled himself into too much exhaustion for strategy. ]
( He grunts, protests for the sake of tired comedy when Qingshan makes light of his bony hip or the dip of his hidden abdomen. He grows in size every day, and in consequence, such that the grunt becomes a hand lifted and set upon Qingshan's head, fingers stroking through hair when his human son snuggles his face into Wei Wuxian's clothing, and the rabbit sleeps, calmed under Lan Zhan's healing touch. )
He loves me best as furniture.
( He says, adding in as much of an arch tone to his voice as he can drum up with a half smile and a brief closing of his eyes. They slit open again not long after, lips twitching at the corners until he's left smiling into a chuckle, sounding lower than usual. Qingshan frowns at the disruption of his perch, nuzzling his face in harder and making his own tired babbling, a litany of complaints that start and end with why are you two like this.
Or perhaps just, stop moving, I want to sleep here, not on a wagon made of ribs and diaphragm.
Oh, but that chuckle is for Lan Zhan's words, and Wei Wuxian turns his head, better to look sideways and askance at Lan Zhan where he's perched, great white heron healing the same creature he'd tried to tell Wei Wuxian to allow, in mercy, a swift ending. Perhaps he'd be better as that kind of ruthless soul, but he thinks it's a tempering between them. Both can be ruthless, at differing times, or coinciding ones. Neither of them walks unstained by their choices or less bright for the fact they've also been shadowed, to differing degrees.
Playful, tired, distracting himself from the haunted worries of what lurks beneath that stone and beneath that temple and surrounded by the energy richness of those waters, over who made four paper-thin human constructs of holier men to hold an unholy power, one that threatened the sanctity of souls, that sought to unbind them from the reincarnation cycle, if the soul is pushed too hard, if it shatters.
Yes, playful, to avoid those thoughts, which will intrude again soon enough. )
Spending time in anyone's company, influence runs both ways. But don't worry, don't worry, Lan Zhan, I haven't forgone the art of conversation, just the non mumbled kind.
( In fact, ending in a mumble. He blinks, lifts his head to look both at the mop of black hair that is Qingshan, and then the large ball of white fur that's the oversized rabbit burden, in its most healing form. )
We've inherited a rabbit.
( They've stumbled directly into a problem, but the rabbit is innocent of that, as is the child. The rabbit child. This child sized rabbit. Or is he? He lets his head thump back, deciding that's tomorrow's problem. )
Or turned into moons. Seems poetic, if impractical.
( He shifts his arm, patting... the far side, all the unclaimed parts of a platform bed he's not even gracefully tried to occupy past the minimum. He's on the bed, the small lives heaped by and on him are there too, and what completes this comedy but the only one with a strict bedtime and his well behaved sleeping position being given the tiger's share? )
All for you. Wait, I'm mumbling chattier answers—Lan Zhan, we saved... at least half the bed for you! I hope rabbits don't kick when they sleep. Qingshan does, I think he's feeling more growing pains again... we'll need to find him a minder before we go back.
( Another pause, and then squinting up at Lan Zhan. )
Are we going back?
( Tomorrow, that is. In an immediacy, and without backup; are they not calling for a night hunt and its confusions, from either Gusu Lan or Yunmeng Jiang, but ah. Jiang Cheng having restraint when it smacks of curses of a perversion not often seen, of a manipulation of energies that might well be trapped and contained instead of redirected, perverting even what Wei Wuxian himself practises in the grand scheme of frightening things...
... Yes. Lan Zhan can make that call. Wei Wuxian, left to his devices, would puzzle through it, letting himself be the bait. He sighs out another inconsequential, less mumbled statement: )
Jade rabbit.
( Not the one at his hip: the one that had been protecting this confused child, in pain and terror and agony and meant for more of the sacrifice. The Jade rabbit. One who gave all of themselves, elevated after death to a second life.
[ At least, until Lan Wangji has completed his petty rituals, and is at liberty to resume this conversation.
He is not as Wei Ying, an animal easily contented to retire for the evening without licking away his hurts, righting the many-headed wrongs of his violated presentation. Luck money and talismans come neatly packaged, for all the humility of the folded paper they bear within. So too, the human body, the chief cultivator: only a man married to rites, bereft of particular merit or creativity, raised to rank by popular agreement that he is of least prickling convictions — showered in lace and finery and the regalia passed down by dubious predecessors, now gradually entertained, for no reason beyond the tolerance of the heavens, as divine. Lan Wangji wakes each day mortal, saunters out of the jingshi a man above men. A product of the Sunshot campaign's legacy.
The guan, first, spider legs of silver absconded between tresses and binds, gently wrestled. His layers, silk and cotton and filigree of glittered thread. His boots, a quick dismissal. Then the modesty screen, splash of his bathing water, the incense stick to mind his wounds and his trailing ankle, to remember the practicalities of healing his own indiscretions. Poorly done, if he is but one, and three mouths — four, the rabbit's joined — depend on him. The athleticism of his golden core will only keep warm and alive if he factors in a certain, inevitable lability of recuperation.
No matter. He returns cleansed, ensconced in his the lesser layers consigned to sleep, with the afterthought of consideration — an ewer, heavy and lukewarm only through the grace of talisman work, scryed in salt and suds (more expenditure) and he discharges it alongside two of the inn's bathing cloths, on Wei Ying's half of this great debate, their sleeping arrangement.
There is a larger accommodation, mere steps away, he conveys with the idle, slow rise and fall of his brows, to an inattentive audience of three. One, he rescues from the swarming, cradling the rabbit in his arms despite its unambiguous heft and lying down on his... side of the cumbersomely smaller, narrower wood and stone slate. The sigh that tortures his lungs does so with the love and care of Zewu-Jun, who has warned him, time and time again, against the dangers (a multitude) of pinning his fate to that of men who are possessed of finer hair than sensibilities.
Not for the first time, tickling the periphery of Wangji's cheek as he settles down, Wei Ying's glistens, raven-feathered and smooth. Irritating. And compounded, when the rabbit nuzzles, viciously pleased when Wangji resumes his strokes and the subtle drain of his energy for healing — Wei Ying brought their new visitor into their lives. Wei Ying and jade rabbits. ]
We return tomorrow. [ A pause, weighed and bartered between the tell-tale pleasantries of his hand on stunted fur. ] The rabbit, also. [ And another breath, hard laboured. Listen. ] We do not surrender him.
[ But what better bait for their own prey, than the life denied to them? Men that defied death to trail after this one creature, desiccated, will not forfeit it when it presents itself so freely before them once more. This much is plain.
And yet, another complication, lingered like sugared thread between them: ]
We will need a time reference for the outside. We lost a day.
[ An hour's incursion in dark depths, and a spring day's passage, from sunrise to sundown, in the waiting world. They cannot afford to lose track in their journey. ]
( Ah, then his eyes slowly creep open, just to watch nothing more than Lan Zhan's return, the steady breaths on him and to his side a lull and lullaby, his own steady breathing sending one son to slumber, and then; Lan Zhan making quiet commentary on Wei Wuxian's choice in resting places, and he brings to himself the energy to snort, a softer sound than usual, less convincing and more action. )
We've slept on worse.
( Is his idle comment, not a helpful reasoning for why they ignore the platform of the bed for the narrower one of the seat, but still, this is also not so cumbersome or uncomfortable a place. He shifts after Lan Zhan makes his own settled piece, Qingshan drooling and deeply slumbering already, small fist curling in and uncurling to pat, in his sleep, his uncooperative pillow. Wei Wuxian handles the sudden assault on his chest with a fond pat, then shifts child and tips him sideway, until he's framing Lan Zhan and his armful of rabbit and the visible relaxation that speaks of healing injuries, more peaceful fates.
All this so he might sit up, look to his own attempts at libations that never make it beyond washed hands and a washed face, a damp wipe at the back of his neck, the column of his throat. Qingshan snuggles into the firmness of his father's side, encounters the fur of the rabbit, frowns and mutters baby nonsense before patting and sneezing, then settling back down.
Wei Wuxian watches this from peripheral vision, heart warmed. Chilled in turns by a seriousness that follows, as he glances down to Lan Zhan as he speaks, bathing cloth against his throat.
Words. Parceled out as Lan Zhan's usually are, weighted as they always will be, meaningful and not empty, most often. He might say always, but he's heard words that have lesser meanings than intended out of Lan Zhan's lips. He remembers those with a sort of fondness that says nothing about their context, and everything about the joy and challenge in discovering just how Lan Zhan could be found to throw his wit and the sharpness of his tongue against those as he saw fit.
That's not tonight's thought. Right now, it's simpler, met with a firm, slow blink of his eyes, drifting from Lan Zhan's face to the rabbit yao, all rabbit now. )
I have an idea. ( Several, really. ) In tracking the time, where it warped. We return, with the rabbit. Qingshan—
( One child in danger is enough. Two is foolhardy, and nothing he wants to risk, not when he'd fought so hard raising A-Yuan and knowing the nature of children is to give their parents room for fear and surprise and hurried dashes to prevent disasters that might be prevented, and observe the learnings of what might not. )
Will not.
( Something known already, but also: )
Jiang Cheng needs to know.
( About this place? About Qingshan. Wei Wuxian, king of delivering his fosterling adopted sons to others stoops?
No, no, not that, and never intended. Never knowing who had lived, when so many had marched to their death for the sake of a powerful man's greed and his paper thing promise.
He sets the towel aside, having held it like an absent thought for too long, then settles again, curved inward, only by circumstance toward Lan Zhan. Qingshan is who settles into the space between chest and stomach and Lan Zhan's side, and that rabbit, such a large presence, is almost comedic in this little group. Jade rabbits, moon rabbits, and rabbits of another kind. )
Lan Zhan... how's your ankle?
( Said as he strokes fingers over Qingshan's mussed, dark hair, looking from child to fellow parent. Sleep is hemming in again, but so are busy thoughts, puzzles for the solving, the very source of so many sleepless nights while Lan Zhan's better habits meant regular resting, not chasing after concepts and possibilities on a midnight wind, as Wei Wuxian is still tempted toward. )
[ They've slept on worse, in beggars' travel beds and tattered inns and ruins. They've slept beside bodies, and Wei Ying among bones. They've slept under Jin Guangyao's roof, absorbing the sweet, cloying scent of his fermenting, poisoned machinations.
They need not settle only for their worst encounters. There are beds in Cloud Recesses better equipped to welcome them — and their companion, the lone and shivered swell of the rabbit that spans Wangji's side, curled without self-preservation, finding the nook of his flank and the perch of his hip, snatched and pale and the cage of its furred body, matted. It yearns for the roiling, calm sorcery at Wangji's fingertips, the healing he doles out between cautious strokes, aware, distantly, that some creatures yearn for qi to their own demerit — that just as the resent that haunted Wei Ying's core despised and expelled his energy, others bask in it without control and measure.
And then there lies Qingshan, a perfect tyrant, condemning Wei Ying to a fraction of the slate's land he might claim, if nothing else, than for having happened upon their makeshift bed first. He nestles, then stretches out, settles his breathing; behind him, sketched in pallor under the very dead and dying of the brazier light, Wangji allows himself this one indulgence, to reach in and nuzzle at his second son's nape, and take in the sweet, milky scent of children. He is beautiful, harmless yet, innocent before he's learned the sword that will spell his path as much as it did that of his fathers, inexorably. Let him stay so, only a little while longer.
Wei Ying's gaze finds him too readily, too soon. Even here, before a man who knew him before he knew himself, Lan Wangji can allow himself only so much indulgence. Exhibitionism ill suits his kind and his clan. And the inn's room rises white and soulless, wind rearing its noxious head to carry in the quiet, questioning shivers of midnight. The eye of fireside flame blinks, long and idle, but sputters on. ]
Better, come morning.
[ His ankle, a needles' cushion of pulsing hurts. Earlier, he supplied it enough of his qi that the wound should be a petty inconvenience in the morning, but no disadvantage in combat. This much, he still recalls: never be so spartan that you make a nuisance of your person. Never let censorship reduce your use — or hurt, or old wonder, or that heinous, dogged thing, bitter vengeance. It lives in him, stoked; warms him better than flame, keeps his hand on the rabbit's back firm, undaunted. ]
What words is he owed? [ The creature, monster, the distantly inherited pain of Yunmeng, uncle removed to Wangji's true son. ] Jiang Wanyin.
[ Better than 'Jiang Cheng', courtesy the noose that steals breath, ransoms it for slivers of well-invested resent. He remembers: Yunmeng, north or south or lake water, calling — Jiang Cheng's territory. By right, the matter falls under his stewardship. And though no lesser gentleman would ask a written report of the chief cultivator, protocol entitles the lord of a realm to understanding the plagues that storm his province.
All the same. All the same, and Wangji's lower lip catches under half-dead bite, teeth combing for blood that never yields to him. Not even this is his. Not even petty pain. ]
You wish him in attendance?
[ Of all the sicknesses, the fleas, the parasites. To think Lan Wangji should expose another son to the sickness of Jiang Cheng. A gift, as any of the others Wei Ying has ever asked of him: humble. Cruel. He is hollowed at times, by these reminders — that every man in Wei Ying's life occupies a place of privilege, where Lan Wangji's steadfastness writes a foregone conclusion. ]
( He sighs, on his side and watching Lan Zhan, watching their son, watching the swell of rabbit visible across the expanse of him. There are things not for him to mend, even if he is, at part, a kindling in a fire that burned to ashes over the years he was in no man's world.
It isn't what he was asking, to bring Jiang Cheng along; he misses what he and his brother were, once, but he doesn't refute the striking out, or the way it's calmed in that confrontation of tears from Jiang Cheng where he still held himself back. Facing the past, facing the present, how does he account for both?
He barely's managing with Lan Zhan.
He reaches out, pokes at Lan Zhan's cheek with a lopsided smile and serious eyes. )
Lan Zhan.
( This isn't his to fix. He can't make a soulmate and a brother find common ground unless and until they want to; and he knows them both too well to believe in much of their capitulations.
Owning affections, he supposes, is hardest with adults. Children, the weak, the animal, it's so much easier without the complication. )
We're within Yunmeng's reach. He should know to keep an eye out, later.
( He at least didn't keep pressing at Lan Zhan's cheek, instead hand falling to brush over Qingshan's head, stroking his hair. Qingshan grunts and presses himself closer to Lan Zhan's side. The rabbit, warm in his touch, and soothed by his qi; Wei Wuxian reaches out to pat that shoulder with the hand resting on the rabbit. )
Rest. It's what heals.
( For all of them, even more than qi. )
Better come morning, right?
( His ankle, the other hurts and hits, the planning for Qingshan's safety, the rabbit yao child now sharing their seated bench turned bed.
If anything, let him be the one to fail to rest. Lan Zhan will always wake too early. )
[ Each wound sears, bleeding stills, flesh mends — or gives, and the body with it, and he aches to know, foreign heartbeat so close, he shares a bed with a killer.
Turns, abrupt like summer storm, to shift the head that contained the rabbit's bellied roundness before and splay it, proprietary, over the land of Wei Ying's breast, slipped down — to the core that waits, a haunting of itself, house and home to wasted potential. Nothingness, consuming the qi Wangji directs senselessly, without reason. Most energy will separate and eradicate itself before reaching its intended target. Only a fraction survives the resentment's filter, and yet he feeds, stubborn and fond and joints twitching, holds Wei Ying's gaze for gelid drifts of time and dares him to object. ]
Better. [ Cartilage broken and splinters of bone, between grit-gravel of teeth. ] Come morning.
[ Presume, then, to intercede: to deny Lan Wangji the invasion of a healing hand, but accept Jiang Cheng's dauntless intrusion. Presume to summon him from the dead, limp mouth of Lotus pier's strength here, to share Wangji's bed. Enough of him, his sickness, the cut of his poisoned mouth like a coiled snake's, waiting to strike at Nightless City — turmoiled, when Wei Ying let go, as if his sword had not wished it so, had not struck the opportunity.
Jiang Cheng is lord here, but no king is always welcome.
He sleeps, steadfast, still seeding energy squandered first on the rabbit, then on Wei Ying, two recipients unlikely to dismiss him — startles awake, with a jolt and dried mouth and stiffness of his back, where the slate's eaten its home against his spine. Sun seeps in like tea infusion, shy with early spring — pale as Lanling Jin's maidens, crafty with their powders.
He stirs, considered: knowing that not all creatures wake with mao shi, that Wei Ying will want a handful of incense sticks further. That Qingshan barely blinks to brief awareness, then curls into his stilled father, patting Wei Ying's arm with a disgruntled fist, as if to punish the one man who stays within reach of his aggression. The rabbit, traitorous, reshapes itself as a sickle against Wei Ying's hip, grazing in sleep.
Better, come morning: Wei Ying at peace, Qingshan refresh, the rabbit aglow with a full coat of fur. Protesting, Wangji's limbs negotiate his release of the slate, the morning rituals of cleansing, meditation, a choice few stretches through the forms. A torpid binding of his clothes, then a slow walk beyond their quarters, once the inn is abuzz with enough life to sketch the course of the morning servants.
Early milk for Qingshan, barely spilled. A request for Wei Ying's fresh water, a proper meal, some vegetables for their... furred visitor. And a lengthier interview, a few choice conversations, the inevitable logistics.
He returns a man victorious, thick doors whispered to a close behind him, step light on ill-lacquered floor. Knelt by the bed-side, he dares the final act of bravery: stirring Wei Ying awake, with barely the suggestion of his hand on a willowy back, two fingers tapping the starting notes of a once-upon-a-time lost song on the pale stretch of Wei Ying's cheek. ]
Wei Ying. [ Wake. Wake, now. Come. He waits until there's the start of light behind Wei Ying's eyes, when they open, until there is wit enough in them that he might yet hope for answer. ] Outside waits Lian Hua. Sixteen of age. Elder sister to four. She mends inn cloth and visitors' robes.
[ Her name, her happenstance, her occupation. Her credentials. Listen. ]
She offers to mind Qingshan. Rise. [ Wake one eye, then the other, and the bones that carry this carcass whole. ] Give blessing.
[ Bathe swiftly. Meet her, one child grateful to attend to another, for a wealth of silvered shrapnel. Unlikely, that Wei Ying should scrape the rust off his dark heart and mine within the resent to reject her, once Lan Wangji has tried the girl, only to find her worthy and true. All the same, one parent's courtesy, extended to another: he may pass judgement of her, before they entrust her with a loved son. ]
( He wants to; wants to say, don't exhaust yourself, and also, this has never worked. He's broken in that emptiness, and the filling of it with resentment ebbs and flows with nothing but Chenqing to call it. He doesn't travel with resentment tied to his body, though he could. He could turn every bag of holding for some spiritual malevolence into a source of strength, as he's done before. Carries touches of borrowed ills and knows how to contain them as pearls within his body, blood-dark and puss-filled, lanced to heal again and again in ceaseless circles.
He wants to say what he knows Lan Zhan already knows, so instead he says nothing, just offers the ghost of a smile, that says, he understands this, too. It was his choice. Digging this out, replanting, seeding someone else's soil.
Some things will not be better come morning. He chooses to only think of those that will, and so that smile, on his lips, and the nod of his head, shifting his hair, is all the answer he gives under Lan Zhan's hand. )
Come morning.
( And he does not sleep, not for longer than he pretends to at first, eyes closed, surrounded more by the warmth that is unimpeded breathing, so many sighs and signs of life around him he feels fully encased in the opposite of the nightmares that still look to take hold. Curbed by living sounds, until he's lulled past the bemoaning of midnight winds, the witched hours of a night that he welcomed once, as easier to move within, as a haunting of his own.
He wakes, slow, to warmth and noise and light, and wants to linger in that lasting illusion of everything perhaps for a moment being somewhat closer to okay.
Tap.Tap tap tap. Is he being tapped out, and he mumbles something as his eyes slit open, sleep hazed and unfocussed, staring then at Lan Zhan uncomprehendingly. Awareness spills past the lingering warmth, and he starts to stretch, coming alive and alert to Lan Zhan's statements and a stretch of limbs that leaves toes curling and arms pressing down against the slate that's likewise left back and joints aching, but the better kind. The aches that wear off with a warmed up body and a series of stretches, which he'll engage in as soon as he stands up, instead stifling a yawn.
Lan Zhan is nothing if not efficient. He smiles, lopsided, and brushes at the shifting mass of his hair down his back from his seated position. )
Leaving him with a tracking talisman?
( Not for her, this well credentialed young lady. Not for Qingshan, exactly. More for both of them, a sort of alarm to set them in motion, if it comes flying to find them. Tracking them down as warning that something unpleasant this way came, and a callback to find him.
Wei Wuxian, paranoid? Let it be known between the two of them that his fears in loss run deeper than he ever lets show. There was a greater careless trust in A-Yuan's life that does not rest with A-Shan, and long years run short imagining children's graves leave shadows against his heart.
All of them with these shadows of losses; basking better in the sunlight, aware of what might chill the marrow.
He near fumbles his way off the not-bed they'd made a make-shift sleeping surface, rubs at his hip with a grimace as ends up with: a rabbit, large, cautiously nosing after him, and Qingshan, avidly walking here and there. He only seems to remember Wei Wuxian once Wei Wuxian remembers water, and there comes he who toddles, latching onto his leg to stare up and mouth the words again and again, up, up, up, and then the basin and washcloth for one man's face turns into morning ablutions with man and child, water dripping down Wuxian's front, child in his arms once they're both patted dry.
It's swift, as much as anything with children can be. The rabbit has watched, has at one point stretched out a furred arm that ended in a human hand to tug on robes; Wei Wuxian tamping down a shudder at the strangeness in order to smile down at the long eared face that settled back into only rabbit form after, twitching a sweet nose up at him, eyes dark as tar. The rabbit moves, then, in search of Lan Zhan; and Wei Wuxian carries A-Shan forward, seeks to meet this Lian Hua, offers her sweet words and apologies for waiting, and sharper eyed catalogues, but he has her blushing even without meaning to, and her youthful belief in good deeds paying in good merits and good coin enough of a reassurance that she will mind, for the sake and hope of what else comes after: what more coin, with so many younger siblings, at least two also girls.
Qingshan is entrusted to the domesticity of this life, while the rabbit is gathered in loaned robes, and Wei Wuxian carries him forth at his hip as if he's hiding yet another child from a world too vast to be lost within. Ill he says all of once, his own features pulled into a tired, grave sort of understanding met by the old woman who asks.
Poor little thing, she says, and with her blessings, they continue down the road.
He doesn't ask if Lan Zhan's arranged for any word to fly toward Jiang Cheng. He holds off for the day, after a night of ache and hollow. Word tomorrow, after this progresses, will be enough. The lightning needn't strike when he who travels for the chaos has already arrived; and Wei Wuxian is he who takes the resentful, commands, contains, redirects; Jiang Cheng is one more blade and one more blunder, one more division of attention and affection.
He's divided twice as it is. Trice, when by Qingshan, and more, as the donkey rejoins, but those two are for later, and he thinks again on the problem of time. )
Mm, Lan Zhan. Tracking the time, linked talismans might help to function. Like with message papers, only the talisman carries the instruction to send each marking of time as it passes.
( It's one thought, with more percolating, ready to drip into a cup of possibility at any particular time. )
[ In step, aligned like forest crown trees. They walk, step slack with fatalistic indifference, interrupted now and then by the garbled talk and curious eye of crones who know their satchel of hundred-years have bought them the filial, rapt attention of strangers, five times over.
There's a bustle and buzz, Wangji supposes, a quiet and private and proprietary exhilaration in witnessing strange novelty paraded down one's market place. Two young gentlemen, and cultivators — and their sickly child. What wonder, in a village reduced. Can Wangji fault them? He took a young bride, mere months before, in the drowned village. Now, with him walks a new mother, and Wei Ying's conceit of a sickly child. At this pace, Wangji will wear, soon, his uncle's whites and behold nephews frolicking with their tempestuous first loves across rooftops and awnings.
( And Wei Ying, so heartbreakingly domestic — a tracking charm, imbued silently on the bell string he gifted their son with premature caution. It cost Wangji so little to allow the whim. )
He bears the inevitable road conversations as he did his childhood fevers, the burst of his first sword calluses: quietly, absently, with slack-jawed indifference. Knowing Wei Ying will maraud through the crowd, and he might yet follow after, swift to intercede only with Bichen's sheathed length when a man's touch comes too close, by accident, to Wei Ying's flank, or a child means to tug at the swaddling of the 'babe', when merchants would stay Wei Ying's step to seduce him to smooth, sheening displays of spice, laid out like quarry gains after an ample hunt.
Before, he was wasteful: Wei Ying spread the seed of his idle, empty chatter in the wind. Sixteen years of silence have taught Wangji to hold his hand out and catch each word.
Time tracked through twin talismans — a curious, make-shift solution combining old artistry, the mundane, and Wei Ying's taste for homey invention. Fair, but for one miscalculation. ]
Set one talisman to burn once a day's passed. Its twin, to burn with us.
[ After, he remembers to explain himself, as with his students of Cloud Recesses — aware, distantly, that Wei Ying knows him in all the ways that shape him from root to branch as a man, but has missed the precarious, splintered sophistication of his progress as a cultivator. They were unequal once, Wei Ying the brazen prodigy, mind blade-sharp but scattered. Time's cheated him of righteous advantage, his knowledge divided and doled out, Wangji's among the many hands to benefit of the Yiling Patriarch's learning. ]
The act of communication between talismans will take seconds on one plan, half a shi on the other.
[ A lag that will only accrue with each transport of an hour's passage. Better to have only one measure, and turn back when their time's done. A day in the world of lights. Mere hours, in the nether lands — four to one, if he evaluated well enough, on their past encounter.
No matter. They will learn soon. Past the village, the temple, the twisted, turning garden roads like thinned rib bones leading below, to an earthly spine: the stone's as they left it, flat and warming under spring sun, frantically beaten. He splays a hand over it, fingers spidering and open, pressure thin as if he expects the reciprocation of a beating heart, the kick of a growing child through a gravid mother's womb.
Nothing. No one.
And when he rips the fetters of yesterday's wards free and jolts the stone over, in a stuttered succession of rolls — only silence. Dark, crackled tar, sulfur's breath. Again, as before: charred meat, ashes, heat cloying. And it strikes him, then: the nether depths. The temple, built hastily above distant eruption.
He does not step. Readies the talisman, one half of parchment, for Wei Ying to bind to its fellow, left outside. A donation of Gusu Lan's wealth, expended on strange cause. He hesitates: ]
Wei Ying. The mountains bled fire, decades ago. Did they... purify after?
[ Collect their dead, bury them well. Salt the grounds and sage the air, and offer amnesty to spirits after. Four times, four years of mourning, and each death named, and each spirit thanked, each altar served with rice and wine, and mourning — great tragedy requires theatre. Did they carry out the functions?
No. No, they would not be here, Wei Ying and he, were the rites well performed. They are, as ever, married to the chaos bound in the world, made flesh in each other. ]
Ask. [ Better the honeyed, sweet tongue of the voluble Patriarch, than the Lan approach to sterile interrogation. Inquiry subjugates spirits, brokers no opportunity for diplomacy or negotiation — wins truth, but not good will. Wei Ying walks a more sinewy, treacherous path. ] Or I shall.
( He listens, even before Wangji explains, shifting the rabbit child's weight (and rabbit child he is, fingers curling into Wei Wuxian's robes, dulled nails on rounded toes poking out of a swaddle, then drawn back in, still showing fine white fur) at his hip, weighing his own ideas against the worth in simply saying yes. There's a world that ran forward while he was left in darkness; he'd meant it to be a more thorough break the once, but through some miscalculation, or someone else's success, it had become its own mystery.
Would you believe me if I said... )
Then you're asking for one to light once it goes dark, here, so pin it high up enough to not fall into early shadow or else remember tonight's a fuller moon... the moon's already up, isn't it? It should set for a while tonight, come back up again later.
( Not the moment for thoughts about rivers of stars spilling across the skies, just the conversation of light and dark; time passes in both directions, but if they truly want to claim responsibility, they'd test it more slowly, more surely. Even using their message paper, a count off that takes longer with the furthering of any distortion...
Really, in the end, this is why there should be some third party, but he doesn't mention it, just listens, and hums a considered note.
It reminds him of god realms and devil realms and ghost forests, that distortion: places where a day might pass, and yet a decade has flown by in the mortal realm. What a shudder inducing thought, that kind of total cut off from the heartbeat of the living world they currently embraced.
Then again, that's the condition they face: death, a sluggish, viscous flow, the decay of rot and the mummification of intent.
Here again at a boulder barrier that is only a suggestion, in the end, of something sturdy. A failing plug, because stone erodes, turns into rounded pebbles that eventually turn into dust lifted on the wind as surely as the ashes of their incense.
He shifts the rabbit-child for the umpteenth time, brow furrowed, an ache unfurling when he closes his eyes and opens himself up to that heat, the decay, the sulphur and cooking; a pause before he has the talisman meant for the outside ready for its affixing to stone, as if that anchors it any better.
There's a pulse of festering rot, a pustule and abcess left undrained and to calcify in the pressure of its covered, buried: terror. )
No... no, but the whole, not all of it needed it. Here did. Here, everything was lacking.
( Some places burn clean in their horrific disasters. Down the mountain, there's no such touch, but here, where it had been healing as much as a past buried beneath the grounds, there were longstanding stains and long lessened bounds of humanity or animal nature to hold any of it in.
No proper theatre, but also, no proper memories, no proper guidance for lives cut short in such an abrupt and violent way. Anger in things like those grows with time, nurses itself stronger.
He taps his outside talisman in place. Lowers the rabbit-child to the ground, and tugs his hand, his awkward legs, his rabbit face that's turned into something a little less grotesquely alien with familiarity, wraps child-rabbit fingers into the weave of his lower robes. )
Hold on.
( He tells a child that does not really understand language, and now, Chenqing in hand, he steps forward to the head of those stairs into darkness, and he plays an entreaty, a request, met with weeping and a shadow coalescing beyond the touch of light: white haired woman, without eyes, on her knees, tears like blood staining the planes of her face. Burns, across all of her; seen and then abruptly gone, glass reflecting different lights while spinning in place. )
I hear their screams, sense some intent, or else I dare Empathy.
( He doesn't dare Empathy. He needs better reason than "because," with a child at his leg, with Lan Zhan at his back, with no gaggle of disciples clustered in a makeshift safehouse, and all of them dancing at the end of someone else's strings. )
I ask, but give me a moment to parse what it is I hear when I listen.
( A step, then another, and he resumes his playing, and the white haired ghost is as burnt or smooth skinned as each note inquires further, and its more nuances of emotion that reaches out to say: Pain. Heat. Consuming. Go. Go. Go. Where do we go?
It's one note in a melody held darker in the caverns below, and the rabbit-child at his side shudders, but pushes closer, cleaving to his leg and burying his face into his robes. Where do we go?
He finishes a last haunting note on Chenqing, subtle shift in expression leaving his eyes looking for Lan Zhan. )
Trapped or greedy, what was never laid to rest sleeps fitfully now. We'll wake it, going further in, but cleansing won't work too far from its fattened centre.
[ Trapped. Greedy. Cleansing won't work. And where did it last fail them, but the embers that brokered Wei Ying's resurgence, the cracked, shade-moistened ground of the burial mounds. Where else would death compound and deepen itself, core to flesh and skin made new, a body hollowed?
Beneath his feet, gravel betrays itself, slips and sinks like sea water, churning. He cuts his path, knowing his place throughout Wei Ying's communion — a steadfast, but silent companion, the hand that reaches for Wei Ying's talisman to cordially replicate it, weave of faint and foreign sorcery coalesced in the borrowed cinnabars of qi, spelling calligraphy on a second parchment. No crude blood's spill, no waste of the body's waters. Only Wangji's half of the bound talismans, husband to the waiting wife on the vacant, sterile stone. A dutiful pair.
He'd laugh, but a pair of striations end Wei Ying's song, and he's stranded, briefly — wrenching himself awake from Chenqing's thrall, discovering new depths to the song's flavour. Bitter, now, with a hint of melancholy. Ephemeral, where before it was once moist and fertile ground, cardamom.
To know a man is to know his magic, his music, his core's flow. To marry one is to marry all. The spectre of his guqin looms, translucid beside him. He dispels it, before it can gain flash. ]
I take responsibility.
[ For the spirits they wake, the torment they invite, the tightness of his lungs, wrung and sickly when he enters the corridor once more first, thrust in damp heat and slick, suffocating madness, in the impossibility of a breath taken easily. If he suffers one heartbeat, Wei Ying endures its stop. He knows the difference between them, knows better than to complain. On his nape, sweat glides down like beads on string.
Lethargy is not an option, not with hours giving chase outside for each long moment within. He makes good time to a destination that withholds itself, vacuous and imperceptible, the liminal space between sleep and dripping awake. Too warm, and the burn moulding with his core, the deeper down the burrow he buries himself, barely recalling to turn back, now and then, to listen — flinching to the scent of burned flesh, the unambiguity of murder —
And stops when he nears it hole like a heart and a core, a waiting cavern with a bounty of tunnelled exits. At the heart of it, slate of stone spread endless like a hopeful maiden, painted in thin, rusted rivulets of blood dried and mud passed. Time, gone with it. And remains, beside and beneath and around it: dust and stone, shadow and fat, burning — and bodies, like paper marionettes, husks of dried skin guarding the walls, sleeping.
Dead, before he need inquire. Dead, perhaps, before Wangji was even a man grown. He dips down, whites scattered about him, drenching in ash, and raises soil in cupped hands, blows it tenderly in the crisped, empty face of one of the waiting cadavers. Sees not a flinching, not breath caught or moving the dirt particles that settle down, not a final gasp. After, the second investigation: hand to the mummified corpse's, tickling the wrist, extending himself subtly to catch a sense of energy that never reveals itself.
Ah, but he is ready to confirm the verdict, head turned to gaze after Wei Wuxian and — ]
They are harmle —
[ — less, until the arm he'd held turns, clawed, livened husk's hand catching Wangji's wrist now. Dead, but different from Wei Ying's creations — possessed. ]
( He holds a sustained note as he crouches down, pulling the rabbit-child to him and standing again, leaping backward out of the open cavern.
The muted horror in seeing that husk take hold of Lan Zhan's wrist becomes, without much thought, narrowed eyes and his flute shoved into his belt, second arm around the child. Shivering and clinging, both rabbit and boy, he's reassuringly alive in a field of shivering, unfurling husks of dead, possessed in a manner Wei Wuxian avoided, with the troubles that came along in preserving the original soul.
Unlike those, these lingering malevolences don't need to fight what isn't there, and they shudder at the sharp whistling Wei Wuxian produces, slowing, halting temporarily, but not stopped.
It's buying time. He shifts the child to pull a talisman free, tossing it at the second mummified corpse reaching for Lan Zhan, seeing it strike home and remembering how many he'd covered Wen Ning in while trying to pull his consciousness back from the roaring abyss of the resentful energies he'd been filled with to overflowing. It's similar here, in once sense, but the corpse responds with a shudder and draws back a step, too strong again to be unmade by one such thing, or even properly bound, but it reaches for its head and ears like the memory of listening can block out Wei Wuxian's retreating whistle.
Lan Zhan better be coming; he withdraws for the sake of the child more than himself, but he doesn't stop sounding, whistle eerie and disorienting for the waking dead in their rasping, clawing, strangely weighted manner.
Not all wake. Despite the lined walls of mummified forms, most don't stir, the focus remaining near Lan Zhan, and near the retreat Wei Wuxian makes. Sightless eyes turn their direction, darkness overflowing, and the scent of burnt fat and fur and hair and the sulphuric tinge to it all builds, a memory being called on for a greater hunger, a divesting, a recollection, a yearning.
Different forms stalled in their hauntings, but still bottomless hunger for accumulated, misshapen wants from lingering impressions of what had once been the thoughts of the living; now, however, simply a drive from the dead.
Not fire, this place. Fire has been here too often. Water; he has that heavy, ironic sense of it, but water may very well be part of what they need.
He doesn't even manage Lan Zhan's name, too busy in his whistling and protection of the child in his arms. )
[ They do not retreat, but fumble. Later, he will think: they fought a war side by side, toppled Jin Guangyao after. Found step in each other's shadow, learned the shape of where their instincts began, and their knowledge ended — and perfected the synchrony that deepens them now in their cowardice.
Once, retreat was hasty, crude like a blunt sword's cut, but tolerable bitterness for even the most sensitive palate. Twice, makes the harder swallow: Wei Ying plays, the child erodes down to trembled lines, and Wangji, rescued of his one assailant, pulls back, ashen and resolute.
He trips, nearly, step ungainly, pebbles and gravel beneath his foot too — warm. This, the sulphurous scent of heat brewing, the bubbling of his boiling blood in veins too dilated to contain it. The creatures, mummified and sallow, thicken their movements, tamed also by the darkened tempo of temperatures, rise and fall and tongue-lulling madness.
Look: the white of his eyes, bright and cruel, the fright in it that sweeps when the spirits make for Wei Ying with that sickened, proprietary greed Wangji has never allowed himself to forget since he first glimpsed it in full at Nightless City. Look again, only, at the child, cradled in Wei Ying's arms, contained. And do not look, when Lan Wangji's arm turns fierce on Wei Ying's waist, dragging him to pivot — not back, as might be admirable and wise, but down another of the linked corridors, half lifting, half pushing Wei Ying farther, quickening their pace. ]
The heat here. It burns them. [ A nod at the child. Keep running. ] And they burned him.
[ He felt it, blaze and scar on his qi when it poured a night's span, to wrestle the creature's hurts. Behind him, they give chase, slowly: Wei Ying's fast friends, the moaning, pained dead, until Wangji recalls Wei Ying's own trickery and casts a warding wall behind them. Enough to stall, if not stay their pursuers.
They cannot bring an offensive attack here, not in the squirming, narrowed belly of the tunnel, not with stone and warmth stifling them, burying them alive. Think. Think. ]
It did not wake until it sensed me. [ A pause, a thick swallow. Both, more than he can afford. The dead here might be... intelligent. Waited, until Wangji was lured, for all even so little base strategy has avoided Wei Ying's creations in the past, barring the more sophisticated Wen Ning. No. More likely: ] It answered movement. Life. Blood water.
[ ...water. Burning. Too much heat. He thinks — ]
Wei Ying. How did they die?
[ He knows, Wei Ying always knows, communed with them even now to subdue them. Cannot look away. ]
( Wei Wuxian finds himself caught and turned, hastening the lift and fall of his feet down the side passage Lan Zhan has selected, lips pursing for a moment that slides past as quickly as they do, child half tucked into his outer robe trembling and ducking his head down further still.
Two kinds of burning, he thinks, listening to Lan Zhan as they run; the one caused by fires, where wood or stone might burn or flow, and the heat carried by water. )
They didn't burn him in the same way. Those weren't blisters from water, those were burns from fire.
( Something is being chased here, other than them, with raspy footsteps and echoes of voices that aren't voices, shouts and screams from a time removed from their own. Similar and different to the ones from the day before, calling for blood, chasing down their rabbit boy.
Lan Zhan wards behind them, and pours over the facts, Wei Wuxian bouncing the child closer, fur tickling at his throat. Or was it hair? He doesn't glance down to check, feeling chubby fingers holding tight to his inner robes. )
Ash. Heat they couldn't breathe through. Waters boiling over and off, rivers running red.
( These tunnels around them now, striated lines from their hip level downward. Outflows of lava buried this deep, forming the tunnels below, a landscape where the mountain had been reshaped in the wake of what natural disaster had fallen. Or what triggered disaster? Had an earth dragon turned over, or something else? The mountain carries an echo of a roar and booming, and there is water beyond these walls: source of heat, source of scent, but cut off from direct access? )
The waters.
( Shifting the child, slowing down to reach out with one hand to touch the wall. )
The ones used for healing, they've been locked away. Lan Zhan, the shifts with what happened left them burnt and buried in ash and fire and heat. The waters—none of them have access to the waters anymore.
( But they want them. They crave them, the life's blood of this place, something thriving and close, close, but no matter how they summon, no matter what husks throwing themselves forward do, they can't find it. Can only find and steal and burn out the vitality in other hapless creatures who stray into their territory...
[ Waters boiling, rivers red. Ash and sulphur and the hard, lung-stripping ache of burn without finish. The eruption.
Its victims, unburied. Forgotten, and it's Wei Ying who makes a quilt of the weave-work of their evidence, Wei Ying who speaks with and unto the dead in their own tongue. The child-rabbit, who borrows the hybrid appearance of the human creature likelier to attract Wei Ying's sympathy, preying on his softened heart.
You know what you know, Wangji does not whisper, but remembers the glint of fear like festive silks, dressing the rabbit whole, like an unholy bride to the inevitability of Wei Ying's instincts to save and shelter. Remember, too, how Bichen was stayed then, before she could truly unsheathe for execution.
And he turns now, back rigid and body only lines, the sum of battle impulses — heated as the tunnels shake and groan, roiling. Ready to strike.
Water, Wei Ying says, and healing. Not locked away in the way of traditional bindings, but secured by the geology of the underground cave. >Distant from the burial rooms. He paces close enough to hover his hand over the exuding warmth of the wall, then — teeth gritting, body prepared for the hiss and the sharp surge of white pain when the burn strikes — rests his palm down. Beneath agony, the pulse of living water, of qi that can only thrive in cleanliness.
Breath laboured, he stands among a wreckage of dust and hot stone, and pivots to face Wei Ying unassuming — only his person and his fresh wounds and the quiet conviction of what must be done. ]
We reunite them. [ As true and indefatigable of a conclusion as the blood that thickens and sheds off his hand. ] Wei Ying. Bichen and talismans may rupture the wall. [ A mechanical deed, not without risk: they sit in labyrinths, without certainty of which wall's upheaval will seduce the ceiling down. ] Do we unleash the waters here, or bring the bones to water?
[ Can they lure so many bodies, mind? Which harm is greater, lesser? And he asks of Wei Ying, but gazes at the rabbit, and gleans too that the creature knows. That it will signal to Wei Ying, its chosen patron, the righteous path. ]
( He watches with brow furrowed, doesn't flinch at Lan Zhan's actions, for all part of him remembers burning underhand himself, which is odd: not one of his standard memories of pain that he has forgotten, but something borrowed. The rabbit-child clutching at him, partly tucked into his robes, and the soft hiss of a gasping inhalation, as the small one turns, rabbit-like nose twitching, ears long and shivering, the whole of his small body taunt.
Focussed on the chamber they'd escaped, and the husk waiting, thirsty, waiting to be filled.
He shifts his grip on the rabbit-child, whispers nonsense of reassurance he isn't cognoscente enough to remember what is in the saying even after the moment of its speaking. Thinks of their son, watched by a woman down the mountain, and the quakes, and the burning, and the flame. Of water, hot and quenching, cold and claiming, tepid and target of a dozen different ailments, swept and sundered. )
The altar. The waters flow above the altar, too.
( He looks to Lan Zhan, expression set. The child, rabbit and boy, stares down the hall too, as the sounds of the restless dead ebb and swirl as whispers and shadows, plucking at their periphery. Wash away, fill the emptiness, sooth the flesh that'd been made of nothing but ash from bone. )
We're going to have to do a lot of running if we bring down that, but... we might be able to shatter the altar, to reach down below.
( The unasked question: which, when both rely on Lan Zhan's strength paired with any talisman Wei Wuxian himself has made. The mechanics, and the brutality of strength, to sunder a ceiling, an altar, or perhaps the thickened walls of the same chamber. Only two perhaps fast enough to spare them from the overwhelming need of the wraiths that filled that chamber, thirst endless as the seas were vast. )
In his mind's eye, the construction abbreviates itself to sharp edges and dark corners and plain lines that insult the sophisticated architecture of a temple in aged luxury, but yield him the plan, plain: here, in the labyrinthine borrows, the dead wait their drops of holy water like heavens' alms. Above, the altar plugs flows, denies passage. Between them, the distinct but negligible separation of filth and gravel, tattered remains and detritus.
Crush the twinned ends, and the old masters' precaution to separate the temple attendants from the baths and the old graves, and hold on knife's blade, balanced, the living and the dead. Strike down, from the altar, or above from laired, chased ground. Better still.
He does not hold Wei Ying's starless gaze for the proposal. Would not presume, knowing it like a threadbare knot, fraying close to dissolution. ]
Take the child. [ The rabbit, once more elevated. Wei Ying's young, the crippled, the weak, the poor, those forever in want of salvation. ] Head to the altar.
[ And the shiver, the great, treacherous inevitability, that Lan Wangji should have to trust in Wei Ying to trick his pursuers out of the labyrinth, to reach the outside again, whole — as much, if not more than Wei Ying must trust in him to bide his time here, unharmed. Watching. Waiting.
His hand tickles the air surrounding the walls again, if only to feel the dragon's breath of captive heat, threatening its burn once more, to thrill himself with the delicious tangs of bearable agony. Quick, you are, to lick flame on him, but not quick enough. For he is of Gusu Lan, and the Lan are of winter, and ice will bear you down. ]
The talismans will alert me of sundown here. We strike at one time.
[ Time passes the quicker here, its many costs frail. He need not be exposed to the hunt of the dead as long as Wei Ying will wait above.
Tenuous, but he may prevail here. Wei Ying, for his part, must cut new path to reach above the grounds. ]
( He holds his gaze on Lan Zhan, the shadowed planes of it, the whites and blues and ice layered over a warmth he remembers to his own surprise, day after day. Not because it's new, the knowledge of it, but because he still comes to terms with if he, the man he's become, should want it as much as he does.
He cares, for the weak and unprotected, for the young and the old, for the sufferers and the suffering. Not with the blind persistence of his younger years, but he still feels the call to take action, has learned after months of travel on his own how to manage that, how to consider, how to move and not make himself the weightbearer for it all.
It is still a process of learning, to trust again, to allow himself the luxury of forgetting his own driving desire to carry more than he can or should. Even a child in his arms, recovering and frightened, half in his robes and shivering against his inner robes, ears long and covered in velvet soft fur, and he steels himself. Tips his head to Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun. )
You too.
( Trust given, trust returned. He shifts the child on his hip and narrows his eyes, stepping forward on silent feet to flow into the dark, then hit stride, and he is everything he was said to be, and nothing like it at all in the moment where he is as alive as the husks of those who stir with his passage, as the blood of the child in his arms sings to them, as the scent of burning intensifies without flame, and Wei Wuxian recalls an older dance of survival and single minded belief, no room for worry, no room for anything but the efficiency of movement, the cold gaze that lacks forgiveness, no room for compromise.
It's not untouched that he emerges, but tattered in negligible ways; scratches as lacerations across his cheek, the backs of hands, the black robes that show little to nothing of their unwhole state. The rise of those final stairs find sunlight spilling over him and the child, protected and anointed in the blood of a man who bleeds clean, when he bleeds these days, and who gains the top, who hears the mournful howling cries of the undead at his back, who seals no entrance but finds they cannot, will not cross to the light, but creep forward greedy for the falling of it.
There is a framework in his mind, the geometry of architecture and energy flow, so that he bides each step its purpose as he says to the child, meant for ears below: )
Together, Lan Zhan.
( For the fall of the sun, for the moment that shadow reigns supreme, for when the fall of earth to shatter the dam holding back the cleansing this mountain has yearned for, pleaded for over an age might see its way through. Uneasy and destructive and healing, all these things and more. )
[ Together, but their pacing staggered, and Lan Wangji — stilted for longer than he will admit later, the hour and its danger passed. He sways, nausea striking his nape and his back, the cloying stench of burning inundating the passageway, drowning him past where he can draw true breath.
Still, he waits — and he waits — and keeps vigil, dancing around his site on firefly-light steps, ever circling without stilling long enough to give the dead cause for chase. Let his scent not catch, let his shadow not deepen, let him wander as his thoughts do, wander and stray like ghosts.
A prediction of some merit: time within the corridors is but a fraction of that passed in the outside world. Wei Ying's wards honour his name, fast, breezy, reliable. Within heartbeats of the first alarm drawn, Lan Wangji comes alive — that same breath, Bichen, her pallor sinking up and twisting, manipulate no more elegantly than a shovel, carving out the shape of stones, like every knife that aims the negative space between vertebrae.
He feels the tumult of coming water in the vibration of dirt, feels the raw ache of it bearing down before it splints rock like heavy needle, thrusting down, first in rivulet, then in stream, then in disaster —
And they scream for it, the dead who wait, who waited their lifetime, who waited no further, for the white roil of water catching sulphur, bathing bones, releasing heat off old volcanic plaques. They recoil, run, and it is to Lan Wangji's shame, withdrawing beside them, that he does not understand at first, they run for the water.
So many dead, spirits, bones. So many unburied. The scratched out terror of each breath nearly prevents the next. He dashes out, limbs protesting, Bichen all but a stringing decoration — until he reaches the outside world with a gasp, his clothes tattered, his fingers all grime and his nails worn. A beggar, returned to the temple, exhausted by the last step he takes before Wei Ying in the great chamber, nearly destroyed.
When he speaks, first, sound eludes him. Then, a wheeze. At long last, coughed, the reckoning: ]
They are grateful. [ He wants to laugh. Can't. ] Grateful.
( The dead had flowed backward, when at first they sought to flow forward with the shadow. He knows that for Lan Zhan's movement even as he tucks the child in tight and himself sets from the ambling motion of a man retaining the looseness of limbs to one who acts, quick and steady. From above, the vibrations, the calculated angle and then driving down with qi stored by merit of patience and awareness that he doesn't have sparing, only efficiency. He's learned those calculations, smiles grimly as the ground buckles from beneath, as a distant roar sends water hissing upward, too, a dry creekbed hidden in overgrowth and filled with the autumn rains filled now from below, one outlet of many.
There's fear in his heart, as the dead shift, and scream, and flow like tumbling rapids push boats downstream in their turbulence. He holds his position, holds the point of broken altar, and the landscape around him and the child alters. His heart, steady and rabbit quick in turns, breath inevitable in and out of lungs, until the age that separates their beginning and their end resolves to a battered, tattered living, breathing, dirtied haunt of a man crosses the threshold into this broken place. Freedom a song that doesn't sing sweet, precisely, but that can be felt as surely as the quaking, with how the hidden depths of this once beautiful place, this age-old sanctuary, drives out its own infection with the puncturing wounds they've decorated its most sanctified grounds.
Wei Wuxian waits, and he lowers the child down, lets him take his feet, and features arranged into something more and more human, as the hours have passed. The fur receding, the nose turning small and human round, the eyes less large, and pale, so pale regardless. Hair pale too, until it's a white haired child with drooping, rabbit ears and a twitch that trembles in his arms. Toddles on his feet, then more sure, the healing of burns from the night prior showing as shining and pink, flesh knitting over, memories being absorbed by young skin.
Wei Wuxian steps toward Lan Zhan as he speaks. When the words come as a wheeze, and before him, the child moves faster. The rabbit-boy, who cannot truly make himself all boy, or all bunny, barreling forward to cling to Lan Zhan's dirtied robes, the wet tatters, and cling like a different child, a lifetime ago. To bawl, heartbroken and with relief, loss and the break away from a fear he hadn't words for, clinging on.
Lan Zhan was the last one to come up, and the last missing piece of his equally small world. Loss might not mean to him what it will in a few more years, but Lan Zhan returns, and the scary world is scary, but a little less so, now.
Wei Wuxian studies his face, stepping closer, one hand coming to rest on top of the sobbing child's head, the other offered, palm up, for Lan Zhan. )
Yeah. ( He could feel it, had felt the shift. ) They are.
[ This child will never be of human-kind, butchered into incongruity. Fate, sorcery and shrivelled magic distorted him, lengthened bone and stripped flesh and painted fur where joints and ligament shouls have shrieked the aches of negative space. Yet Wei Ying cradles him as he would a second, third son, and Lan Wangji knows the truth of him: he will come, as their other children have followed, to earn his place at the Cloud Recesses. So be it.
Brows briefly perked up to flag the token resistance of his incredulity, he clasps Wei Ying's hand, sweat of his nerves to the grit of Lan Wangji's palm, binding their fingers together and taking shameful advantage. Weight lent, he uses the balance to drop to one knee, depositing Bichen to her fettering and straining to sling an arm out and welcome the child in his keep.
He comes, more eager than any living thing should, but innocent in the way of every rabbit that's sought Lan Wangji out to nestle, pale against pallor, its frailty near his mourning sickness, both bare before the sun. Wangji allows it soot and succor, the warmth of his body, a slow and bartered reassurance. A second child waits with his minder in the inn; this one, here, now, heart a deep gong's swing, merits the full measure of Lan Wangji's attention.
They paralyse just so for longer than he'd intended, one arm around the child-rabbit, Lan Wangji's hand still clawing around Wei Ying's. He tugs down. ]
...we should not have left the Burial Mounds as we did.
[ A lacklustre segue, but for their private understanding: they should have salted the barren lands, cleansed away their shadows, extricated their decay. Should have set the grief and regret they summoned and grew in those lands, should have cultivated to their peace.
Lest they become this: festered. A fantasy of regrets. Wronged. ]
We will return there for amends.
[ Together, Wei Ying's word of each day. Very well. ]
( Wei Ying has it in him to fold gracefully, arm firm and balance for Lan Zhan where so often its been the other way around. Watches their third child, for who else will have this one? Who will contest, not seek out death for the sake of eradicating a perversion that is still a life, a living being, finding his own space to fill within the tapestry of their lives?
Challenges are all they collect for themselves, or so life spins itself into becoming, and he finds the ground with his knees, and he shifts closer, circle of their joined arms and the resting of his hand on child's head moving into one that strokes reassuring down his back, over Lan Zhan's arm, settles in there as one pressure in passing over another.
Curled around like hamsters nuzzling into bellies as they sleep, content to let the world past swiftly while they stretch out and wait for the night and what safety it brings.
Yiling, another scabbing scar in his chest, and he picks at it gladly, worries at it and smiles without the shadows dragging behind to say the expression is for show. Hums before he speaks, a warmed note in his throat, held and carried. )
We will. Though for the sakes of the children, ( he says; ) make it a land that can heal, and grow, and allow them to play without its old concerns.
( Death not grasping, madness not seeping, possession of bodies too simple without the concentrated will to resist. A land made whole, out of its barren brutality, and he knows from a lifetime ago, it can be so.
With the time, the effort, the dedication, the resources, it will be so.
He stays as he is, their tightened circle, and only stirs as the child's sobs have long petered into quiet sniffles, the lines of his form softening into an exhaustion the adults must carry on from. Shifts, fingers tightening under Lan Zhan's grip: reassurance and question, his brow quirked, his lips softened into an almost curving line. )
One more son to collect.
( Here he stirs, and feels their own cleansing to be called forth, while his heart feels lighter than it has in some time over scarred lines, buried deep. He cannot wait to see their other child, cannot wait in this moment to see Sizhui, and can wait, for related reasons, for when Lan Zhan moves, to lend his support, and the tired child his side, as if he's a man who can bear the burdens of those he chooses just as much as they can choose to bear his burdens in turn. Together. )
[ ...another son. The third, already, reaped by their hands, seeded by misfortune. Against his chest, the rabbit sighs out the natural anguish of a small body learning the comforts of protection, trusting the next stroke of Wei Ying's hand will spark fires of lethargy to lick at his limbs.
Known for the sword, the guqin, the path of violence, but sacrificed as bed board for the epileptic pulse of a wayward, infant's heartbeat. Lan Wangji would protest, but Wei Ying falls first prey to their routine, and the hour softens to the gentle, febrile cooing of a child settling in place.
Sizhui might have stood so between them, learning the love of two and not passed as priceless burden between the members of the sect, until Lan Wangji returned to him from gelid confinement. They've stolen too much of him, reimbursed little and late. Now, second chances brokered —
And there's the stink of sulphur and hot stone, of moving, precious water. Grime on his legs, where they fold into finery and silk, blood flaked and crisp, deteriorating. Baths. ]
Yes.
[ An inn, a quarter, a night's succour after. Return tomorrow, when the bodies they unearth from the causeway will want their dues, their rites and their last words, shared. When there will be more than urgency and less than dread between them.
He lifts, sparing Wei Ying barely a nod, then a nudge of their joined hands around the child, and washes his mouth on the rabbit-fine fur, the tip of the creature's nose. Uncle will not want such a guest, but he will take a refugee, and so they will present him. No matter his soul's aches, Lan Qiren has never turned nose or walked away from a harrowed innocent.
But still, as they start the walk, even Lan Wangji must note: ]
( In motion, the thin peace that had enfolded their moment in the aftermath of chaos exhales and expires, and he smiles, for the child, for Lan Zhan, for the son waiting in hearth-home nearby, for the son waiting li further still. This rabbit child, who shifts and turns and starts to mold into the comfort of Lan Zhan's dirtied arms, once more sliding the scale toward leporine features, as if each inhalation and exhalation a shifting canvas makes.
Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps what this child of misfortune needs is what Gusu Lan provides even to the most fortunate of children, orphans taken in by nostalgia and offered safety in places that claimed impossible was only a state of mind.
Clarity, focus. There are other gifts delivered in the cool clinging fogs of Gusu, by the structured strictures of the Lan. Words like Lan Zhan's, a different kind of code, tip him into laughing, a tired roll of amusement that aches without hurting at all. )
Right, right. A daughter next time. I'll consult with the universe, it should be so kind as to provide.
( A smile, a wink, and the path spilling downward for the resolution of the evening: each step gains momentum if not energy, so that they're closer with each moment to their first safely minded Qingshan. They're welcomed with wide, curious eyes, a woman paid well and given to a sleeping child at her heart, curled up next to a cat, lean and muscled, and an older child minding the fire with the distraction of the young upon their arrival.
Roused from slumber, their waiting son rubs at his eyes, and beams, and holds out his arms: a demand with the sleepy presentation of the not fully awake, lapsing into mumbled complaint at his waking state and a burrowing nuzzle of his head against a collarbone, hidden. Asking after lodgings points toward another inn, one closer, facilities less polished, interiors carefully decorated, and bathing tubs of metal and kept warm through the ingenuity of the mortals not so blessed as to live in cultivation's finer tunings of work. Negotiated, three baths, and the child left in another's care for most the day demanding in increasingly less sleepy turn to come with, such that Wei Wuxian brings his nose to their human son's in a bop and nuzzle before turning his face to Lan Zhan, smiling tired and content, knowing tomorrow's mission and at ease with the straightforwardness of it: )
Do you have room for two?
( To mean: do you have the energy, because I'm happy taking him in for splashes and earnest attempts to scrub both of them clean in one small, dedicated radius before his childish attention span wanders away again. It means the shorter soak; and they now number two who need the time, and Wei Wuxian considers he can probably handle both. Or handle them first, to lay to rest, if Qingshan will cooperate in curling up with their rabbit-child and sleep the sleep of the young and growing. )
[ They retreat like scavenging hounds with broken scraps to fill concave bellies, the fractions of Qingshan's affection a thickened, stoked deluge after long hours of bone-blanching hunger. The nursemaid surrenders him easily, a beautiful boy for one day's love but fractious after, in the way of children spoiled by the radiance of undying devotion. At Cloud Recesses, in Caiyi, in travel, Qingshan is master and commander of every room he waddles, and he will not be denied. Today, he wishes his voice heard once more.
It's Wei Ying who answers him, while fresh accommodations go brokered. Wei Ying, who steps first, Wei Ying who flirts with toil unending, while Lan Wangji's shadow casts long and deep, a respectable distance behind him. Then, amid the fulmination of cloying, clawing incense, in a room far too expectant of a sophisticated traveller's tastes for a seating of the provinces —
...ah. May Lan Wangji suffer the presence of one of his children in the bathtub Arms steeled, he clings to their nameless rabbit son, then only raises his brow and calmly swoops in to wrest Qingshan free of Wei Ying, also. ]
Wei Ying. [ For how often he speaks the name, poison and honey, known and dissolving. Diluting. But granular, patient, seeding and present — humoured, perhaps, to serve reminders of the plain and the established. ] I raised a child.
[ Long years of dread and mourning and sickness and knee scrapes and bruising, when the first brushes with the sword turned an eruption of adolescent discoveries that heroes might win the wars of poetry, but they do not walk from combat of the living world entirely unscathed. That warriors are not born, but scrupulously crafted, and Sizhui, the hold on the hilt is weak, the turn of the calf too tense, the lines of defence too tender, and — there, the first blow bleeds into a wounding, and the boy (turned man) learns.
Perhaps there were nursemaids too, and a loving uncle, a fostering grandmaster. Perhaps a sect volunteered itself to pay the weak, strangled imprecation of a missing master's fatherhood, while he sought chaos in the wake of his soulmate's disaster.
No matter. He lays claim to Lan Sizhui's rearing, one moment and all. He will raise these two sons also, however dubious Wei Ying stands of his care. He pauses only the one moment: ]
Name your third son.
[ Let Wei Ying have his say of the one thing, while Lan Wangji retreats to shed grit and grime and silks for himself and his two children behind the modesty screen. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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The inn room does not suit them: sterile, it reeks of the throwaway practicalities of service, past pleasure. Lan Wangji requires no privileges his hands cannot deliver — this, the jingshi taught. Bathing water can be brought in tub and barrels, food procured alongside the gentle meanderings of a passing scholar, visiting the library domes, or an attendant, lent purpose. Wangji's possessions are extensions of his person, defined by the day's work: blood stains of friendly cinnabar jagged on strips of culled cotton, to spare blanched parchment. Lop-sided, the sophisticated stretches of costly silver worked in mirror glass, or coarser binds of polished brass, to practise his curse work. His books, his weapons, his finery — the packaging of Hanguang-Jun, rank preceding the person.
He did not know until he travelled alongside Wei Ying, who wears the scent of burned chestnut and home as he passes, how deeply Lan Wangji has grown summarily infected with wanderlust for the familiar.
Qingshan echoes him, cries plangent and crystalline, when the inn's maid delivers his bathing water and Wangji remembers to reward him with the flesh-pinkening rites of his ablution. Each limb stretched, each bone stroked, back and front and then the dip of him, like an ocean pearl, to bask in the brisk and happy dance of flailing arms and kicking feet, and half of his basin's water tumbled around him. If Lan Wangji should wear the better part of his son's rose and hyacinth salts, complimentary, as if Qingshan were but a visiting madam of a lesser clan — well, Lan Wangji has shrouded himself in half of the burrow's gravelly dark, already.
After, he retrieves the child, dresses him in only the necessities of his lower half, to enjoy the licking heat that diffuses in their quarters, sputtered in thin-smoke wisps by braziers. In his arms, Qingshan settles — further, when Lan Wangji resorts to the night's second weapon, the cup of milk carefully cradled against the child's mouth. He eats a peasant's fill, a starved man's. More than your three bowls of rice, Wangji does not not warn, because the particulars of precepts do not apply to those yet unable to whisper them alive.
He means to pass to child to the waiting bed, but stills in his step, hovered by Wei Ying, and remembers, the instinct to hide Sizhui beneath rabbits — and another, now to bury Wei Ying, curled and sweet, under children. Look at him, Qingshan's spider-lashed and wary blinks, and find an accomplice. Wangji nods to seal their pact, and carefully descends him by his father — watches Qingshan's majestic crawl over his rabbit friend, to land perilously flattened atop Wei Ying's hip. Ah. ]
Does he.
[ The lie betrays itself, his quirked brow notes, just as Lan Wangji dips down to occupy the edge of Wei Ying's seating, like a maiden attendant waiting to serve the master's cup or his wine, wasting trinkets of touch and lazy flows of qi when he passes a hand over the rabbit. Animal-like once more, returned to his nature. Long-eared, leathery nose, jittery paws. It shivers, when Wangji's touch first lands, when their energy streams bide their time to coordinate. Then, the lessening of its breath into quiet, soft sleep, nestled against Wei Ying. Heal, then. Heal, both of them, together. ]
You speak as we do when you tire.
[ With the stilted, rough-edged formality of the Gusu Lan dialect, chirped but unable to prosper the hope of further conversation. An empty observation, but Wei Ying's manhandled himself into too much exhaustion for strategy. ]
Ill-suiting.
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He loves me best as furniture.
( He says, adding in as much of an arch tone to his voice as he can drum up with a half smile and a brief closing of his eyes. They slit open again not long after, lips twitching at the corners until he's left smiling into a chuckle, sounding lower than usual. Qingshan frowns at the disruption of his perch, nuzzling his face in harder and making his own tired babbling, a litany of complaints that start and end with why are you two like this.
Or perhaps just, stop moving, I want to sleep here, not on a wagon made of ribs and diaphragm.
Oh, but that chuckle is for Lan Zhan's words, and Wei Wuxian turns his head, better to look sideways and askance at Lan Zhan where he's perched, great white heron healing the same creature he'd tried to tell Wei Wuxian to allow, in mercy, a swift ending. Perhaps he'd be better as that kind of ruthless soul, but he thinks it's a tempering between them. Both can be ruthless, at differing times, or coinciding ones. Neither of them walks unstained by their choices or less bright for the fact they've also been shadowed, to differing degrees.
Playful, tired, distracting himself from the haunted worries of what lurks beneath that stone and beneath that temple and surrounded by the energy richness of those waters, over who made four paper-thin human constructs of holier men to hold an unholy power, one that threatened the sanctity of souls, that sought to unbind them from the reincarnation cycle, if the soul is pushed too hard, if it shatters.
Yes, playful, to avoid those thoughts, which will intrude again soon enough. )
Spending time in anyone's company, influence runs both ways. But don't worry, don't worry, Lan Zhan, I haven't forgone the art of conversation, just the non mumbled kind.
( In fact, ending in a mumble. He blinks, lifts his head to look both at the mop of black hair that is Qingshan, and then the large ball of white fur that's the oversized rabbit burden, in its most healing form. )
We've inherited a rabbit.
( They've stumbled directly into a problem, but the rabbit is innocent of that, as is the child. The rabbit child. This child sized rabbit. Or is he? He lets his head thump back, deciding that's tomorrow's problem. )
Or turned into moons. Seems poetic, if impractical.
( He shifts his arm, patting... the far side, all the unclaimed parts of a platform bed he's not even gracefully tried to occupy past the minimum. He's on the bed, the small lives heaped by and on him are there too, and what completes this comedy but the only one with a strict bedtime and his well behaved sleeping position being given the tiger's share? )
All for you. Wait, I'm mumbling chattier answers—Lan Zhan, we saved... at least half the bed for you! I hope rabbits don't kick when they sleep. Qingshan does, I think he's feeling more growing pains again... we'll need to find him a minder before we go back.
( Another pause, and then squinting up at Lan Zhan. )
Are we going back?
( Tomorrow, that is. In an immediacy, and without backup; are they not calling for a night hunt and its confusions, from either Gusu Lan or Yunmeng Jiang, but ah. Jiang Cheng having restraint when it smacks of curses of a perversion not often seen, of a manipulation of energies that might well be trapped and contained instead of redirected, perverting even what Wei Wuxian himself practises in the grand scheme of frightening things...
... Yes. Lan Zhan can make that call. Wei Wuxian, left to his devices, would puzzle through it, letting himself be the bait. He sighs out another inconsequential, less mumbled statement: )
Jade rabbit.
( Not the one at his hip: the one that had been protecting this confused child, in pain and terror and agony and meant for more of the sacrifice. The Jade rabbit. One who gave all of themselves, elevated after death to a second life.
Ha. Ha. Haaaaa. )
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[ At least, until Lan Wangji has completed his petty rituals, and is at liberty to resume this conversation.
He is not as Wei Ying, an animal easily contented to retire for the evening without licking away his hurts, righting the many-headed wrongs of his violated presentation. Luck money and talismans come neatly packaged, for all the humility of the folded paper they bear within. So too, the human body, the chief cultivator: only a man married to rites, bereft of particular merit or creativity, raised to rank by popular agreement that he is of least prickling convictions — showered in lace and finery and the regalia passed down by dubious predecessors, now gradually entertained, for no reason beyond the tolerance of the heavens, as divine. Lan Wangji wakes each day mortal, saunters out of the jingshi a man above men. A product of the Sunshot campaign's legacy.
The guan, first, spider legs of silver absconded between tresses and binds, gently wrestled. His layers, silk and cotton and filigree of glittered thread. His boots, a quick dismissal. Then the modesty screen, splash of his bathing water, the incense stick to mind his wounds and his trailing ankle, to remember the practicalities of healing his own indiscretions. Poorly done, if he is but one, and three mouths — four, the rabbit's joined — depend on him. The athleticism of his golden core will only keep warm and alive if he factors in a certain, inevitable lability of recuperation.
No matter. He returns cleansed, ensconced in his the lesser layers consigned to sleep, with the afterthought of consideration — an ewer, heavy and lukewarm only through the grace of talisman work, scryed in salt and suds (more expenditure) and he discharges it alongside two of the inn's bathing cloths, on Wei Ying's half of this great debate, their sleeping arrangement.
There is a larger accommodation, mere steps away, he conveys with the idle, slow rise and fall of his brows, to an inattentive audience of three. One, he rescues from the swarming, cradling the rabbit in his arms despite its unambiguous heft and lying down on his... side of the cumbersomely smaller, narrower wood and stone slate. The sigh that tortures his lungs does so with the love and care of Zewu-Jun, who has warned him, time and time again, against the dangers (a multitude) of pinning his fate to that of men who are possessed of finer hair than sensibilities.
Not for the first time, tickling the periphery of Wangji's cheek as he settles down, Wei Ying's glistens, raven-feathered and smooth. Irritating. And compounded, when the rabbit nuzzles, viciously pleased when Wangji resumes his strokes and the subtle drain of his energy for healing — Wei Ying brought their new visitor into their lives. Wei Ying and jade rabbits. ]
We return tomorrow. [ A pause, weighed and bartered between the tell-tale pleasantries of his hand on stunted fur. ] The rabbit, also. [ And another breath, hard laboured. Listen. ] We do not surrender him.
[ But what better bait for their own prey, than the life denied to them? Men that defied death to trail after this one creature, desiccated, will not forfeit it when it presents itself so freely before them once more. This much is plain.
And yet, another complication, lingered like sugared thread between them: ]
We will need a time reference for the outside. We lost a day.
[ An hour's incursion in dark depths, and a spring day's passage, from sunrise to sundown, in the waiting world. They cannot afford to lose track in their journey. ]
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We've slept on worse.
( Is his idle comment, not a helpful reasoning for why they ignore the platform of the bed for the narrower one of the seat, but still, this is also not so cumbersome or uncomfortable a place. He shifts after Lan Zhan makes his own settled piece, Qingshan drooling and deeply slumbering already, small fist curling in and uncurling to pat, in his sleep, his uncooperative pillow. Wei Wuxian handles the sudden assault on his chest with a fond pat, then shifts child and tips him sideway, until he's framing Lan Zhan and his armful of rabbit and the visible relaxation that speaks of healing injuries, more peaceful fates.
All this so he might sit up, look to his own attempts at libations that never make it beyond washed hands and a washed face, a damp wipe at the back of his neck, the column of his throat. Qingshan snuggles into the firmness of his father's side, encounters the fur of the rabbit, frowns and mutters baby nonsense before patting and sneezing, then settling back down.
Wei Wuxian watches this from peripheral vision, heart warmed. Chilled in turns by a seriousness that follows, as he glances down to Lan Zhan as he speaks, bathing cloth against his throat.
Words. Parceled out as Lan Zhan's usually are, weighted as they always will be, meaningful and not empty, most often. He might say always, but he's heard words that have lesser meanings than intended out of Lan Zhan's lips. He remembers those with a sort of fondness that says nothing about their context, and everything about the joy and challenge in discovering just how Lan Zhan could be found to throw his wit and the sharpness of his tongue against those as he saw fit.
That's not tonight's thought. Right now, it's simpler, met with a firm, slow blink of his eyes, drifting from Lan Zhan's face to the rabbit yao, all rabbit now. )
I have an idea. ( Several, really. ) In tracking the time, where it warped. We return, with the rabbit. Qingshan—
( One child in danger is enough. Two is foolhardy, and nothing he wants to risk, not when he'd fought so hard raising A-Yuan and knowing the nature of children is to give their parents room for fear and surprise and hurried dashes to prevent disasters that might be prevented, and observe the learnings of what might not. )
Will not.
( Something known already, but also: )
Jiang Cheng needs to know.
( About this place? About Qingshan. Wei Wuxian, king of delivering his fosterling adopted sons to others stoops?
No, no, not that, and never intended. Never knowing who had lived, when so many had marched to their death for the sake of a powerful man's greed and his paper thing promise.
He sets the towel aside, having held it like an absent thought for too long, then settles again, curved inward, only by circumstance toward Lan Zhan. Qingshan is who settles into the space between chest and stomach and Lan Zhan's side, and that rabbit, such a large presence, is almost comedic in this little group. Jade rabbits, moon rabbits, and rabbits of another kind. )
Lan Zhan... how's your ankle?
( Said as he strokes fingers over Qingshan's mussed, dark hair, looking from child to fellow parent. Sleep is hemming in again, but so are busy thoughts, puzzles for the solving, the very source of so many sleepless nights while Lan Zhan's better habits meant regular resting, not chasing after concepts and possibilities on a midnight wind, as Wei Wuxian is still tempted toward. )
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They need not settle only for their worst encounters. There are beds in Cloud Recesses better equipped to welcome them — and their companion, the lone and shivered swell of the rabbit that spans Wangji's side, curled without self-preservation, finding the nook of his flank and the perch of his hip, snatched and pale and the cage of its furred body, matted. It yearns for the roiling, calm sorcery at Wangji's fingertips, the healing he doles out between cautious strokes, aware, distantly, that some creatures yearn for qi to their own demerit — that just as the resent that haunted Wei Ying's core despised and expelled his energy, others bask in it without control and measure.
And then there lies Qingshan, a perfect tyrant, condemning Wei Ying to a fraction of the slate's land he might claim, if nothing else, than for having happened upon their makeshift bed first. He nestles, then stretches out, settles his breathing; behind him, sketched in pallor under the very dead and dying of the brazier light, Wangji allows himself this one indulgence, to reach in and nuzzle at his second son's nape, and take in the sweet, milky scent of children. He is beautiful, harmless yet, innocent before he's learned the sword that will spell his path as much as it did that of his fathers, inexorably. Let him stay so, only a little while longer.
Wei Ying's gaze finds him too readily, too soon. Even here, before a man who knew him before he knew himself, Lan Wangji can allow himself only so much indulgence. Exhibitionism ill suits his kind and his clan. And the inn's room rises white and soulless, wind rearing its noxious head to carry in the quiet, questioning shivers of midnight. The eye of fireside flame blinks, long and idle, but sputters on. ]
Better, come morning.
[ His ankle, a needles' cushion of pulsing hurts. Earlier, he supplied it enough of his qi that the wound should be a petty inconvenience in the morning, but no disadvantage in combat. This much, he still recalls: never be so spartan that you make a nuisance of your person. Never let censorship reduce your use — or hurt, or old wonder, or that heinous, dogged thing, bitter vengeance. It lives in him, stoked; warms him better than flame, keeps his hand on the rabbit's back firm, undaunted. ]
What words is he owed? [ The creature, monster, the distantly inherited pain of Yunmeng, uncle removed to Wangji's true son. ] Jiang Wanyin.
[ Better than 'Jiang Cheng', courtesy the noose that steals breath, ransoms it for slivers of well-invested resent. He remembers: Yunmeng, north or south or lake water, calling — Jiang Cheng's territory. By right, the matter falls under his stewardship. And though no lesser gentleman would ask a written report of the chief cultivator, protocol entitles the lord of a realm to understanding the plagues that storm his province.
All the same. All the same, and Wangji's lower lip catches under half-dead bite, teeth combing for blood that never yields to him. Not even this is his. Not even petty pain. ]
You wish him in attendance?
[ Of all the sicknesses, the fleas, the parasites. To think Lan Wangji should expose another son to the sickness of Jiang Cheng. A gift, as any of the others Wei Ying has ever asked of him: humble. Cruel. He is hollowed at times, by these reminders — that every man in Wei Ying's life occupies a place of privilege, where Lan Wangji's steadfastness writes a foregone conclusion. ]
Your brother excels at war.
[ Not exorcism. ]
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It isn't what he was asking, to bring Jiang Cheng along; he misses what he and his brother were, once, but he doesn't refute the striking out, or the way it's calmed in that confrontation of tears from Jiang Cheng where he still held himself back. Facing the past, facing the present, how does he account for both?
He barely's managing with Lan Zhan.
He reaches out, pokes at Lan Zhan's cheek with a lopsided smile and serious eyes. )
Lan Zhan.
( This isn't his to fix. He can't make a soulmate and a brother find common ground unless and until they want to; and he knows them both too well to believe in much of their capitulations.
Owning affections, he supposes, is hardest with adults. Children, the weak, the animal, it's so much easier without the complication. )
We're within Yunmeng's reach. He should know to keep an eye out, later.
( He at least didn't keep pressing at Lan Zhan's cheek, instead hand falling to brush over Qingshan's head, stroking his hair. Qingshan grunts and presses himself closer to Lan Zhan's side. The rabbit, warm in his touch, and soothed by his qi; Wei Wuxian reaches out to pat that shoulder with the hand resting on the rabbit. )
Rest. It's what heals.
( For all of them, even more than qi. )
Better come morning, right?
( His ankle, the other hurts and hits, the planning for Qingshan's safety, the rabbit yao child now sharing their seated bench turned bed.
If anything, let him be the one to fail to rest. Lan Zhan will always wake too early. )
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Turns, abrupt like summer storm, to shift the head that contained the rabbit's bellied roundness before and splay it, proprietary, over the land of Wei Ying's breast, slipped down — to the core that waits, a haunting of itself, house and home to wasted potential. Nothingness, consuming the qi Wangji directs senselessly, without reason. Most energy will separate and eradicate itself before reaching its intended target. Only a fraction survives the resentment's filter, and yet he feeds, stubborn and fond and joints twitching, holds Wei Ying's gaze for gelid drifts of time and dares him to object. ]
Better. [ Cartilage broken and splinters of bone, between grit-gravel of teeth. ] Come morning.
[ Presume, then, to intercede: to deny Lan Wangji the invasion of a healing hand, but accept Jiang Cheng's dauntless intrusion. Presume to summon him from the dead, limp mouth of Lotus pier's strength here, to share Wangji's bed. Enough of him, his sickness, the cut of his poisoned mouth like a coiled snake's, waiting to strike at Nightless City — turmoiled, when Wei Ying let go, as if his sword had not wished it so, had not struck the opportunity.
Jiang Cheng is lord here, but no king is always welcome.
He sleeps, steadfast, still seeding energy squandered first on the rabbit, then on Wei Ying, two recipients unlikely to dismiss him — startles awake, with a jolt and dried mouth and stiffness of his back, where the slate's eaten its home against his spine. Sun seeps in like tea infusion, shy with early spring — pale as Lanling Jin's maidens, crafty with their powders.
He stirs, considered: knowing that not all creatures wake with mao shi, that Wei Ying will want a handful of incense sticks further. That Qingshan barely blinks to brief awareness, then curls into his stilled father, patting Wei Ying's arm with a disgruntled fist, as if to punish the one man who stays within reach of his aggression. The rabbit, traitorous, reshapes itself as a sickle against Wei Ying's hip, grazing in sleep.
Better, come morning: Wei Ying at peace, Qingshan refresh, the rabbit aglow with a full coat of fur. Protesting, Wangji's limbs negotiate his release of the slate, the morning rituals of cleansing, meditation, a choice few stretches through the forms. A torpid binding of his clothes, then a slow walk beyond their quarters, once the inn is abuzz with enough life to sketch the course of the morning servants.
Early milk for Qingshan, barely spilled. A request for Wei Ying's fresh water, a proper meal, some vegetables for their... furred visitor. And a lengthier interview, a few choice conversations, the inevitable logistics.
He returns a man victorious, thick doors whispered to a close behind him, step light on ill-lacquered floor. Knelt by the bed-side, he dares the final act of bravery: stirring Wei Ying awake, with barely the suggestion of his hand on a willowy back, two fingers tapping the starting notes of a once-upon-a-time lost song on the pale stretch of Wei Ying's cheek. ]
Wei Ying. [ Wake. Wake, now. Come. He waits until there's the start of light behind Wei Ying's eyes, when they open, until there is wit enough in them that he might yet hope for answer. ] Outside waits Lian Hua. Sixteen of age. Elder sister to four. She mends inn cloth and visitors' robes.
[ Her name, her happenstance, her occupation. Her credentials. Listen. ]
She offers to mind Qingshan. Rise. [ Wake one eye, then the other, and the bones that carry this carcass whole. ] Give blessing.
[ Bathe swiftly. Meet her, one child grateful to attend to another, for a wealth of silvered shrapnel. Unlikely, that Wei Ying should scrape the rust off his dark heart and mine within the resent to reject her, once Lan Wangji has tried the girl, only to find her worthy and true. All the same, one parent's courtesy, extended to another: he may pass judgement of her, before they entrust her with a loved son. ]
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He wants to say what he knows Lan Zhan already knows, so instead he says nothing, just offers the ghost of a smile, that says, he understands this, too. It was his choice. Digging this out, replanting, seeding someone else's soil.
Some things will not be better come morning. He chooses to only think of those that will, and so that smile, on his lips, and the nod of his head, shifting his hair, is all the answer he gives under Lan Zhan's hand. )
Come morning.
( And he does not sleep, not for longer than he pretends to at first, eyes closed, surrounded more by the warmth that is unimpeded breathing, so many sighs and signs of life around him he feels fully encased in the opposite of the nightmares that still look to take hold. Curbed by living sounds, until he's lulled past the bemoaning of midnight winds, the witched hours of a night that he welcomed once, as easier to move within, as a haunting of his own.
He wakes, slow, to warmth and noise and light, and wants to linger in that lasting illusion of everything perhaps for a moment being somewhat closer to okay.
Tap. Tap tap tap. Is he being tapped out, and he mumbles something as his eyes slit open, sleep hazed and unfocussed, staring then at Lan Zhan uncomprehendingly. Awareness spills past the lingering warmth, and he starts to stretch, coming alive and alert to Lan Zhan's statements and a stretch of limbs that leaves toes curling and arms pressing down against the slate that's likewise left back and joints aching, but the better kind. The aches that wear off with a warmed up body and a series of stretches, which he'll engage in as soon as he stands up, instead stifling a yawn.
Lan Zhan is nothing if not efficient. He smiles, lopsided, and brushes at the shifting mass of his hair down his back from his seated position. )
Leaving him with a tracking talisman?
( Not for her, this well credentialed young lady. Not for Qingshan, exactly. More for both of them, a sort of alarm to set them in motion, if it comes flying to find them. Tracking them down as warning that something unpleasant this way came, and a callback to find him.
Wei Wuxian, paranoid? Let it be known between the two of them that his fears in loss run deeper than he ever lets show. There was a greater careless trust in A-Yuan's life that does not rest with A-Shan, and long years run short imagining children's graves leave shadows against his heart.
All of them with these shadows of losses; basking better in the sunlight, aware of what might chill the marrow.
He near fumbles his way off the not-bed they'd made a make-shift sleeping surface, rubs at his hip with a grimace as ends up with: a rabbit, large, cautiously nosing after him, and Qingshan, avidly walking here and there. He only seems to remember Wei Wuxian once Wei Wuxian remembers water, and there comes he who toddles, latching onto his leg to stare up and mouth the words again and again, up, up, up, and then the basin and washcloth for one man's face turns into morning ablutions with man and child, water dripping down Wuxian's front, child in his arms once they're both patted dry.
It's swift, as much as anything with children can be. The rabbit has watched, has at one point stretched out a furred arm that ended in a human hand to tug on robes; Wei Wuxian tamping down a shudder at the strangeness in order to smile down at the long eared face that settled back into only rabbit form after, twitching a sweet nose up at him, eyes dark as tar. The rabbit moves, then, in search of Lan Zhan; and Wei Wuxian carries A-Shan forward, seeks to meet this Lian Hua, offers her sweet words and apologies for waiting, and sharper eyed catalogues, but he has her blushing even without meaning to, and her youthful belief in good deeds paying in good merits and good coin enough of a reassurance that she will mind, for the sake and hope of what else comes after: what more coin, with so many younger siblings, at least two also girls.
Qingshan is entrusted to the domesticity of this life, while the rabbit is gathered in loaned robes, and Wei Wuxian carries him forth at his hip as if he's hiding yet another child from a world too vast to be lost within. Ill he says all of once, his own features pulled into a tired, grave sort of understanding met by the old woman who asks.
Poor little thing, she says, and with her blessings, they continue down the road.
He doesn't ask if Lan Zhan's arranged for any word to fly toward Jiang Cheng. He holds off for the day, after a night of ache and hollow. Word tomorrow, after this progresses, will be enough. The lightning needn't strike when he who travels for the chaos has already arrived; and Wei Wuxian is he who takes the resentful, commands, contains, redirects; Jiang Cheng is one more blade and one more blunder, one more division of attention and affection.
He's divided twice as it is. Trice, when by Qingshan, and more, as the donkey rejoins, but those two are for later, and he thinks again on the problem of time. )
Mm, Lan Zhan. Tracking the time, linked talismans might help to function. Like with message papers, only the talisman carries the instruction to send each marking of time as it passes.
( It's one thought, with more percolating, ready to drip into a cup of possibility at any particular time. )
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There's a bustle and buzz, Wangji supposes, a quiet and private and proprietary exhilaration in witnessing strange novelty paraded down one's market place. Two young gentlemen, and cultivators — and their sickly child. What wonder, in a village reduced. Can Wangji fault them? He took a young bride, mere months before, in the drowned village. Now, with him walks a new mother, and Wei Ying's conceit of a sickly child. At this pace, Wangji will wear, soon, his uncle's whites and behold nephews frolicking with their tempestuous first loves across rooftops and awnings.
( And Wei Ying, so heartbreakingly domestic — a tracking charm, imbued silently on the bell string he gifted their son with premature caution. It cost Wangji so little to allow the whim. )
He bears the inevitable road conversations as he did his childhood fevers, the burst of his first sword calluses: quietly, absently, with slack-jawed indifference. Knowing Wei Ying will maraud through the crowd, and he might yet follow after, swift to intercede only with Bichen's sheathed length when a man's touch comes too close, by accident, to Wei Ying's flank, or a child means to tug at the swaddling of the 'babe', when merchants would stay Wei Ying's step to seduce him to smooth, sheening displays of spice, laid out like quarry gains after an ample hunt.
Before, he was wasteful: Wei Ying spread the seed of his idle, empty chatter in the wind. Sixteen years of silence have taught Wangji to hold his hand out and catch each word.
Time tracked through twin talismans — a curious, make-shift solution combining old artistry, the mundane, and Wei Ying's taste for homey invention. Fair, but for one miscalculation. ]
Set one talisman to burn once a day's passed. Its twin, to burn with us.
[ After, he remembers to explain himself, as with his students of Cloud Recesses — aware, distantly, that Wei Ying knows him in all the ways that shape him from root to branch as a man, but has missed the precarious, splintered sophistication of his progress as a cultivator. They were unequal once, Wei Ying the brazen prodigy, mind blade-sharp but scattered. Time's cheated him of righteous advantage, his knowledge divided and doled out, Wangji's among the many hands to benefit of the Yiling Patriarch's learning. ]
The act of communication between talismans will take seconds on one plan, half a shi on the other.
[ A lag that will only accrue with each transport of an hour's passage. Better to have only one measure, and turn back when their time's done. A day in the world of lights. Mere hours, in the nether lands — four to one, if he evaluated well enough, on their past encounter.
No matter. They will learn soon. Past the village, the temple, the twisted, turning garden roads like thinned rib bones leading below, to an earthly spine: the stone's as they left it, flat and warming under spring sun, frantically beaten. He splays a hand over it, fingers spidering and open, pressure thin as if he expects the reciprocation of a beating heart, the kick of a growing child through a gravid mother's womb.
Nothing. No one.
And when he rips the fetters of yesterday's wards free and jolts the stone over, in a stuttered succession of rolls — only silence. Dark, crackled tar, sulfur's breath. Again, as before: charred meat, ashes, heat cloying. And it strikes him, then: the nether depths. The temple, built hastily above distant eruption.
He does not step. Readies the talisman, one half of parchment, for Wei Ying to bind to its fellow, left outside. A donation of Gusu Lan's wealth, expended on strange cause. He hesitates: ]
Wei Ying. The mountains bled fire, decades ago. Did they... purify after?
[ Collect their dead, bury them well. Salt the grounds and sage the air, and offer amnesty to spirits after. Four times, four years of mourning, and each death named, and each spirit thanked, each altar served with rice and wine, and mourning — great tragedy requires theatre. Did they carry out the functions?
No. No, they would not be here, Wei Ying and he, were the rites well performed. They are, as ever, married to the chaos bound in the world, made flesh in each other. ]
Ask. [ Better the honeyed, sweet tongue of the voluble Patriarch, than the Lan approach to sterile interrogation. Inquiry subjugates spirits, brokers no opportunity for diplomacy or negotiation — wins truth, but not good will. Wei Ying walks a more sinewy, treacherous path. ] Or I shall.
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Would you believe me if I said... )
Then you're asking for one to light once it goes dark, here, so pin it high up enough to not fall into early shadow or else remember tonight's a fuller moon... the moon's already up, isn't it? It should set for a while tonight, come back up again later.
( Not the moment for thoughts about rivers of stars spilling across the skies, just the conversation of light and dark; time passes in both directions, but if they truly want to claim responsibility, they'd test it more slowly, more surely. Even using their message paper, a count off that takes longer with the furthering of any distortion...
Really, in the end, this is why there should be some third party, but he doesn't mention it, just listens, and hums a considered note.
It reminds him of god realms and devil realms and ghost forests, that distortion: places where a day might pass, and yet a decade has flown by in the mortal realm. What a shudder inducing thought, that kind of total cut off from the heartbeat of the living world they currently embraced.
Then again, that's the condition they face: death, a sluggish, viscous flow, the decay of rot and the mummification of intent.
Here again at a boulder barrier that is only a suggestion, in the end, of something sturdy. A failing plug, because stone erodes, turns into rounded pebbles that eventually turn into dust lifted on the wind as surely as the ashes of their incense.
He shifts the rabbit-child for the umpteenth time, brow furrowed, an ache unfurling when he closes his eyes and opens himself up to that heat, the decay, the sulphur and cooking; a pause before he has the talisman meant for the outside ready for its affixing to stone, as if that anchors it any better.
There's a pulse of festering rot, a pustule and abcess left undrained and to calcify in the pressure of its covered, buried: terror. )
No... no, but the whole, not all of it needed it. Here did. Here, everything was lacking.
( Some places burn clean in their horrific disasters. Down the mountain, there's no such touch, but here, where it had been healing as much as a past buried beneath the grounds, there were longstanding stains and long lessened bounds of humanity or animal nature to hold any of it in.
No proper theatre, but also, no proper memories, no proper guidance for lives cut short in such an abrupt and violent way. Anger in things like those grows with time, nurses itself stronger.
He taps his outside talisman in place. Lowers the rabbit-child to the ground, and tugs his hand, his awkward legs, his rabbit face that's turned into something a little less grotesquely alien with familiarity, wraps child-rabbit fingers into the weave of his lower robes. )
Hold on.
( He tells a child that does not really understand language, and now, Chenqing in hand, he steps forward to the head of those stairs into darkness, and he plays an entreaty, a request, met with weeping and a shadow coalescing beyond the touch of light: white haired woman, without eyes, on her knees, tears like blood staining the planes of her face. Burns, across all of her; seen and then abruptly gone, glass reflecting different lights while spinning in place. )
I hear their screams, sense some intent, or else I dare Empathy.
( He doesn't dare Empathy. He needs better reason than "because," with a child at his leg, with Lan Zhan at his back, with no gaggle of disciples clustered in a makeshift safehouse, and all of them dancing at the end of someone else's strings. )
I ask, but give me a moment to parse what it is I hear when I listen.
( A step, then another, and he resumes his playing, and the white haired ghost is as burnt or smooth skinned as each note inquires further, and its more nuances of emotion that reaches out to say: Pain. Heat. Consuming. Go. Go. Go. Where do we go?
It's one note in a melody held darker in the caverns below, and the rabbit-child at his side shudders, but pushes closer, cleaving to his leg and burying his face into his robes. Where do we go?
He finishes a last haunting note on Chenqing, subtle shift in expression leaving his eyes looking for Lan Zhan. )
Trapped or greedy, what was never laid to rest sleeps fitfully now. We'll wake it, going further in, but cleansing won't work too far from its fattened centre.
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Beneath his feet, gravel betrays itself, slips and sinks like sea water, churning. He cuts his path, knowing his place throughout Wei Ying's communion — a steadfast, but silent companion, the hand that reaches for Wei Ying's talisman to cordially replicate it, weave of faint and foreign sorcery coalesced in the borrowed cinnabars of qi, spelling calligraphy on a second parchment. No crude blood's spill, no waste of the body's waters. Only Wangji's half of the bound talismans, husband to the waiting wife on the vacant, sterile stone. A dutiful pair.
He'd laugh, but a pair of striations end Wei Ying's song, and he's stranded, briefly — wrenching himself awake from Chenqing's thrall, discovering new depths to the song's flavour. Bitter, now, with a hint of melancholy. Ephemeral, where before it was once moist and fertile ground, cardamom.
To know a man is to know his magic, his music, his core's flow. To marry one is to marry all. The spectre of his guqin looms, translucid beside him. He dispels it, before it can gain flash. ]
I take responsibility.
[ For the spirits they wake, the torment they invite, the tightness of his lungs, wrung and sickly when he enters the corridor once more first, thrust in damp heat and slick, suffocating madness, in the impossibility of a breath taken easily. If he suffers one heartbeat, Wei Ying endures its stop. He knows the difference between them, knows better than to complain. On his nape, sweat glides down like beads on string.
Lethargy is not an option, not with hours giving chase outside for each long moment within. He makes good time to a destination that withholds itself, vacuous and imperceptible, the liminal space between sleep and dripping awake. Too warm, and the burn moulding with his core, the deeper down the burrow he buries himself, barely recalling to turn back, now and then, to listen — flinching to the scent of burned flesh, the unambiguity of murder —
And stops when he nears it hole like a heart and a core, a waiting cavern with a bounty of tunnelled exits. At the heart of it, slate of stone spread endless like a hopeful maiden, painted in thin, rusted rivulets of blood dried and mud passed. Time, gone with it. And remains, beside and beneath and around it: dust and stone, shadow and fat, burning — and bodies, like paper marionettes, husks of dried skin guarding the walls, sleeping.
Dead, before he need inquire. Dead, perhaps, before Wangji was even a man grown.
He dips down, whites scattered about him, drenching in ash, and raises soil in cupped hands, blows it tenderly in the crisped, empty face of one of the waiting cadavers. Sees not a flinching, not breath caught or moving the dirt particles that settle down, not a final gasp. After, the second investigation: hand to the mummified corpse's, tickling the wrist, extending himself subtly to catch a sense of energy that never reveals itself.
Ah, but he is ready to confirm the verdict, head turned to gaze after Wei Wuxian and — ]
They are harmle —
[ — less, until the arm he'd held turns, clawed, livened husk's hand catching Wangji's wrist now. Dead, but different from Wei Ying's creations — possessed. ]
Turn the child back.
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The muted horror in seeing that husk take hold of Lan Zhan's wrist becomes, without much thought, narrowed eyes and his flute shoved into his belt, second arm around the child. Shivering and clinging, both rabbit and boy, he's reassuringly alive in a field of shivering, unfurling husks of dead, possessed in a manner Wei Wuxian avoided, with the troubles that came along in preserving the original soul.
Unlike those, these lingering malevolences don't need to fight what isn't there, and they shudder at the sharp whistling Wei Wuxian produces, slowing, halting temporarily, but not stopped.
It's buying time. He shifts the child to pull a talisman free, tossing it at the second mummified corpse reaching for Lan Zhan, seeing it strike home and remembering how many he'd covered Wen Ning in while trying to pull his consciousness back from the roaring abyss of the resentful energies he'd been filled with to overflowing. It's similar here, in once sense, but the corpse responds with a shudder and draws back a step, too strong again to be unmade by one such thing, or even properly bound, but it reaches for its head and ears like the memory of listening can block out Wei Wuxian's retreating whistle.
Lan Zhan better be coming; he withdraws for the sake of the child more than himself, but he doesn't stop sounding, whistle eerie and disorienting for the waking dead in their rasping, clawing, strangely weighted manner.
Not all wake. Despite the lined walls of mummified forms, most don't stir, the focus remaining near Lan Zhan, and near the retreat Wei Wuxian makes. Sightless eyes turn their direction, darkness overflowing, and the scent of burnt fat and fur and hair and the sulphuric tinge to it all builds, a memory being called on for a greater hunger, a divesting, a recollection, a yearning.
Different forms stalled in their hauntings, but still bottomless hunger for accumulated, misshapen wants from lingering impressions of what had once been the thoughts of the living; now, however, simply a drive from the dead.
Not fire, this place. Fire has been here too often. Water; he has that heavy, ironic sense of it, but water may very well be part of what they need.
He doesn't even manage Lan Zhan's name, too busy in his whistling and protection of the child in his arms. )
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Once, retreat was hasty, crude like a blunt sword's cut, but tolerable bitterness for even the most sensitive palate. Twice, makes the harder swallow: Wei Ying plays, the child erodes down to trembled lines, and Wangji, rescued of his one assailant, pulls back, ashen and resolute.
He trips, nearly, step ungainly, pebbles and gravel beneath his foot too — warm. This, the sulphurous scent of heat brewing, the bubbling of his boiling blood in veins too dilated to contain it. The creatures, mummified and sallow, thicken their movements, tamed also by the darkened tempo of temperatures, rise and fall and tongue-lulling madness.
Look: the white of his eyes, bright and cruel, the fright in it that sweeps when the spirits make for Wei Ying with that sickened, proprietary greed Wangji has never allowed himself to forget since he first glimpsed it in full at Nightless City. Look again, only, at the child, cradled in Wei Ying's arms, contained. And do not look, when Lan Wangji's arm turns fierce on Wei Ying's waist, dragging him to pivot — not back, as might be admirable and wise, but down another of the linked corridors, half lifting, half pushing Wei Ying farther, quickening their pace. ]
The heat here. It burns them. [ A nod at the child. Keep running. ] And they burned him.
[ He felt it, blaze and scar on his qi when it poured a night's span, to wrestle the creature's hurts. Behind him, they give chase, slowly: Wei Ying's fast friends, the moaning, pained dead, until Wangji recalls Wei Ying's own trickery and casts a warding wall behind them. Enough to stall, if not stay their pursuers.
They cannot bring an offensive attack here, not in the squirming, narrowed belly of the tunnel, not with stone and warmth stifling them, burying them alive. Think. Think. ]
It did not wake until it sensed me. [ A pause, a thick swallow. Both, more than he can afford. The dead here might be... intelligent. Waited, until Wangji was lured, for all even so little base strategy has avoided Wei Ying's creations in the past, barring the more sophisticated Wen Ning. No. More likely: ] It answered movement. Life. Blood water.
[ ...water. Burning. Too much heat. He thinks — ]
Wei Ying. How did they die?
[ He knows, Wei Ying always knows, communed with them even now to subdue them. Cannot look away. ]
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Two kinds of burning, he thinks, listening to Lan Zhan as they run; the one caused by fires, where wood or stone might burn or flow, and the heat carried by water. )
They didn't burn him in the same way. Those weren't blisters from water, those were burns from fire.
( Something is being chased here, other than them, with raspy footsteps and echoes of voices that aren't voices, shouts and screams from a time removed from their own. Similar and different to the ones from the day before, calling for blood, chasing down their rabbit boy.
Lan Zhan wards behind them, and pours over the facts, Wei Wuxian bouncing the child closer, fur tickling at his throat. Or was it hair? He doesn't glance down to check, feeling chubby fingers holding tight to his inner robes. )
Ash. Heat they couldn't breathe through. Waters boiling over and off, rivers running red.
( These tunnels around them now, striated lines from their hip level downward. Outflows of lava buried this deep, forming the tunnels below, a landscape where the mountain had been reshaped in the wake of what natural disaster had fallen. Or what triggered disaster? Had an earth dragon turned over, or something else? The mountain carries an echo of a roar and booming, and there is water beyond these walls: source of heat, source of scent, but cut off from direct access? )
The waters.
( Shifting the child, slowing down to reach out with one hand to touch the wall. )
The ones used for healing, they've been locked away. Lan Zhan, the shifts with what happened left them burnt and buried in ash and fire and heat. The waters—none of them have access to the waters anymore.
( But they want them. They crave them, the life's blood of this place, something thriving and close, close, but no matter how they summon, no matter what husks throwing themselves forward do, they can't find it. Can only find and steal and burn out the vitality in other hapless creatures who stray into their territory...
... or who are fed there. )
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Its victims, unburied. Forgotten, and it's Wei Ying who makes a quilt of the weave-work of their evidence, Wei Ying who speaks with and unto the dead in their own tongue. The child-rabbit, who borrows the hybrid appearance of the human creature likelier to attract Wei Ying's sympathy, preying on his softened heart.
You know what you know, Wangji does not whisper, but remembers the glint of fear like festive silks, dressing the rabbit whole, like an unholy bride to the inevitability of Wei Ying's instincts to save and shelter. Remember, too, how Bichen was stayed then, before she could truly unsheathe for execution.
And he turns now, back rigid and body only lines, the sum of battle impulses — heated as the tunnels shake and groan, roiling. Ready to strike.
Water, Wei Ying says, and healing. Not locked away in the way of traditional bindings, but secured by the geology of the underground cave. >Distant from the burial rooms. He paces close enough to hover his hand over the exuding warmth of the wall, then — teeth gritting, body prepared for the hiss and the sharp surge of white pain when the burn strikes — rests his palm down. Beneath agony, the pulse of living water, of qi that can only thrive in cleanliness.
Breath laboured, he stands among a wreckage of dust and hot stone, and pivots to face Wei Ying unassuming — only his person and his fresh wounds and the quiet conviction of what must be done. ]
We reunite them. [ As true and indefatigable of a conclusion as the blood that thickens and sheds off his hand. ] Wei Ying. Bichen and talismans may rupture the wall. [ A mechanical deed, not without risk: they sit in labyrinths, without certainty of which wall's upheaval will seduce the ceiling down. ] Do we unleash the waters here, or bring the bones to water?
[ Can they lure so many bodies, mind? Which harm is greater, lesser? And he asks of Wei Ying, but gazes at the rabbit, and gleans too that the creature knows. That it will signal to Wei Ying, its chosen patron, the righteous path. ]
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Focussed on the chamber they'd escaped, and the husk waiting, thirsty, waiting to be filled.
He shifts his grip on the rabbit-child, whispers nonsense of reassurance he isn't cognoscente enough to remember what is in the saying even after the moment of its speaking. Thinks of their son, watched by a woman down the mountain, and the quakes, and the burning, and the flame. Of water, hot and quenching, cold and claiming, tepid and target of a dozen different ailments, swept and sundered. )
The altar. The waters flow above the altar, too.
( He looks to Lan Zhan, expression set. The child, rabbit and boy, stares down the hall too, as the sounds of the restless dead ebb and swirl as whispers and shadows, plucking at their periphery. Wash away, fill the emptiness, sooth the flesh that'd been made of nothing but ash from bone. )
We're going to have to do a lot of running if we bring down that, but... we might be able to shatter the altar, to reach down below.
( The unasked question: which, when both rely on Lan Zhan's strength paired with any talisman Wei Wuxian himself has made. The mechanics, and the brutality of strength, to sunder a ceiling, an altar, or perhaps the thickened walls of the same chamber. Only two perhaps fast enough to spare them from the overwhelming need of the wraiths that filled that chamber, thirst endless as the seas were vast. )
There rests the heart of darkness.
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In his mind's eye, the construction abbreviates itself to sharp edges and dark corners and plain lines that insult the sophisticated architecture of a temple in aged luxury, but yield him the plan, plain: here, in the labyrinthine borrows, the dead wait their drops of holy water like heavens' alms. Above, the altar plugs flows, denies passage. Between them, the distinct but negligible separation of filth and gravel, tattered remains and detritus.
Crush the twinned ends, and the old masters' precaution to separate the temple attendants from the baths and the old graves, and hold on knife's blade, balanced, the living and the dead. Strike down, from the altar, or above from laired, chased ground. Better still.
He does not hold Wei Ying's starless gaze for the proposal. Would not presume, knowing it like a threadbare knot, fraying close to dissolution. ]
Take the child. [ The rabbit, once more elevated. Wei Ying's young, the crippled, the weak, the poor, those forever in want of salvation. ] Head to the altar.
[ And the shiver, the great, treacherous inevitability, that Lan Wangji should have to trust in Wei Ying to trick his pursuers out of the labyrinth, to reach the outside again, whole — as much, if not more than Wei Ying must trust in him to bide his time here, unharmed. Watching. Waiting.
His hand tickles the air surrounding the walls again, if only to feel the dragon's breath of captive heat, threatening its burn once more, to thrill himself with the delicious tangs of bearable agony. Quick, you are, to lick flame on him, but not quick enough. For he is of Gusu Lan, and the Lan are of winter, and ice will bear you down. ]
The talismans will alert me of sundown here. We strike at one time.
[ Time passes the quicker here, its many costs frail. He need not be exposed to the hunt of the dead as long as Wei Ying will wait above.
Tenuous, but he may prevail here. Wei Ying, for his part, must cut new path to reach above the grounds. ]
Go safely.
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He cares, for the weak and unprotected, for the young and the old, for the sufferers and the suffering. Not with the blind persistence of his younger years, but he still feels the call to take action, has learned after months of travel on his own how to manage that, how to consider, how to move and not make himself the weightbearer for it all.
It is still a process of learning, to trust again, to allow himself the luxury of forgetting his own driving desire to carry more than he can or should. Even a child in his arms, recovering and frightened, half in his robes and shivering against his inner robes, ears long and covered in velvet soft fur, and he steels himself. Tips his head to Lan Zhan, Lan Wangji, Hanguang-jun. )
You too.
( Trust given, trust returned. He shifts the child on his hip and narrows his eyes, stepping forward on silent feet to flow into the dark, then hit stride, and he is everything he was said to be, and nothing like it at all in the moment where he is as alive as the husks of those who stir with his passage, as the blood of the child in his arms sings to them, as the scent of burning intensifies without flame, and Wei Wuxian recalls an older dance of survival and single minded belief, no room for worry, no room for anything but the efficiency of movement, the cold gaze that lacks forgiveness, no room for compromise.
It's not untouched that he emerges, but tattered in negligible ways; scratches as lacerations across his cheek, the backs of hands, the black robes that show little to nothing of their unwhole state. The rise of those final stairs find sunlight spilling over him and the child, protected and anointed in the blood of a man who bleeds clean, when he bleeds these days, and who gains the top, who hears the mournful howling cries of the undead at his back, who seals no entrance but finds they cannot, will not cross to the light, but creep forward greedy for the falling of it.
There is a framework in his mind, the geometry of architecture and energy flow, so that he bides each step its purpose as he says to the child, meant for ears below: )
Together, Lan Zhan.
( For the fall of the sun, for the moment that shadow reigns supreme, for when the fall of earth to shatter the dam holding back the cleansing this mountain has yearned for, pleaded for over an age might see its way through. Uneasy and destructive and healing, all these things and more. )
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Still, he waits — and he waits — and keeps vigil, dancing around his site on firefly-light steps, ever circling without stilling long enough to give the dead cause for chase. Let his scent not catch, let his shadow not deepen, let him wander as his thoughts do, wander and stray like ghosts.
A prediction of some merit: time within the corridors is but a fraction of that passed in the outside world. Wei Ying's wards honour his name, fast, breezy, reliable. Within heartbeats of the first alarm drawn, Lan Wangji comes alive — that same breath, Bichen, her pallor sinking up and twisting, manipulate no more elegantly than a shovel, carving out the shape of stones, like every knife that aims the negative space between vertebrae.
He feels the tumult of coming water in the vibration of dirt, feels the raw ache of it bearing down before it splints rock like heavy needle, thrusting down, first in rivulet, then in stream, then in disaster —
And they scream for it, the dead who wait, who waited their lifetime, who waited no further, for the white roil of water catching sulphur, bathing bones, releasing heat off old volcanic plaques. They recoil, run, and it is to Lan Wangji's shame, withdrawing beside them, that he does not understand at first, they run for the water.
So many dead, spirits, bones. So many unburied. The scratched out terror of each breath nearly prevents the next. He dashes out, limbs protesting, Bichen all but a stringing decoration — until he reaches the outside world with a gasp, his clothes tattered, his fingers all grime and his nails worn. A beggar, returned to the temple, exhausted by the last step he takes before Wei Ying in the great chamber, nearly destroyed.
When he speaks, first, sound eludes him. Then, a wheeze. At long last, coughed, the reckoning: ]
They are grateful. [ He wants to laugh. Can't. ] Grateful.
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There's fear in his heart, as the dead shift, and scream, and flow like tumbling rapids push boats downstream in their turbulence. He holds his position, holds the point of broken altar, and the landscape around him and the child alters. His heart, steady and rabbit quick in turns, breath inevitable in and out of lungs, until the age that separates their beginning and their end resolves to a battered, tattered living, breathing, dirtied haunt of a man crosses the threshold into this broken place. Freedom a song that doesn't sing sweet, precisely, but that can be felt as surely as the quaking, with how the hidden depths of this once beautiful place, this age-old sanctuary, drives out its own infection with the puncturing wounds they've decorated its most sanctified grounds.
Wei Wuxian waits, and he lowers the child down, lets him take his feet, and features arranged into something more and more human, as the hours have passed. The fur receding, the nose turning small and human round, the eyes less large, and pale, so pale regardless. Hair pale too, until it's a white haired child with drooping, rabbit ears and a twitch that trembles in his arms. Toddles on his feet, then more sure, the healing of burns from the night prior showing as shining and pink, flesh knitting over, memories being absorbed by young skin.
Wei Wuxian steps toward Lan Zhan as he speaks. When the words come as a wheeze, and before him, the child moves faster. The rabbit-boy, who cannot truly make himself all boy, or all bunny, barreling forward to cling to Lan Zhan's dirtied robes, the wet tatters, and cling like a different child, a lifetime ago. To bawl, heartbroken and with relief, loss and the break away from a fear he hadn't words for, clinging on.
Lan Zhan was the last one to come up, and the last missing piece of his equally small world. Loss might not mean to him what it will in a few more years, but Lan Zhan returns, and the scary world is scary, but a little less so, now.
Wei Wuxian studies his face, stepping closer, one hand coming to rest on top of the sobbing child's head, the other offered, palm up, for Lan Zhan. )
Yeah. ( He could feel it, had felt the shift. ) They are.
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Brows briefly perked up to flag the token resistance of his incredulity, he clasps Wei Ying's hand, sweat of his nerves to the grit of Lan Wangji's palm, binding their fingers together and taking shameful advantage. Weight lent, he uses the balance to drop to one knee, depositing Bichen to her fettering and straining to sling an arm out and welcome the child in his keep.
He comes, more eager than any living thing should, but innocent in the way of every rabbit that's sought Lan Wangji out to nestle, pale against pallor, its frailty near his mourning sickness, both bare before the sun. Wangji allows it soot and succor, the warmth of his body, a slow and bartered reassurance. A second child waits with his minder in the inn; this one, here, now, heart a deep gong's swing, merits the full measure of Lan Wangji's attention.
They paralyse just so for longer than he'd intended, one arm around the child-rabbit, Lan Wangji's hand still clawing around Wei Ying's. He tugs down. ]
...we should not have left the Burial Mounds as we did.
[ A lacklustre segue, but for their private understanding: they should have salted the barren lands, cleansed away their shadows, extricated their decay. Should have set the grief and regret they summoned and grew in those lands, should have cultivated to their peace.
Lest they become this: festered. A fantasy of regrets. Wronged. ]
We will return there for amends.
[ Together, Wei Ying's word of each day. Very well. ]
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Challenges are all they collect for themselves, or so life spins itself into becoming, and he finds the ground with his knees, and he shifts closer, circle of their joined arms and the resting of his hand on child's head moving into one that strokes reassuring down his back, over Lan Zhan's arm, settles in there as one pressure in passing over another.
Curled around like hamsters nuzzling into bellies as they sleep, content to let the world past swiftly while they stretch out and wait for the night and what safety it brings.
Yiling, another scabbing scar in his chest, and he picks at it gladly, worries at it and smiles without the shadows dragging behind to say the expression is for show. Hums before he speaks, a warmed note in his throat, held and carried. )
We will. Though for the sakes of the children, ( he says; ) make it a land that can heal, and grow, and allow them to play without its old concerns.
( Death not grasping, madness not seeping, possession of bodies too simple without the concentrated will to resist. A land made whole, out of its barren brutality, and he knows from a lifetime ago, it can be so.
With the time, the effort, the dedication, the resources, it will be so.
He stays as he is, their tightened circle, and only stirs as the child's sobs have long petered into quiet sniffles, the lines of his form softening into an exhaustion the adults must carry on from. Shifts, fingers tightening under Lan Zhan's grip: reassurance and question, his brow quirked, his lips softened into an almost curving line. )
One more son to collect.
( Here he stirs, and feels their own cleansing to be called forth, while his heart feels lighter than it has in some time over scarred lines, buried deep. He cannot wait to see their other child, cannot wait in this moment to see Sizhui, and can wait, for related reasons, for when Lan Zhan moves, to lend his support, and the tired child his side, as if he's a man who can bear the burdens of those he chooses just as much as they can choose to bear his burdens in turn. Together. )
Baths?
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Known for the sword, the guqin, the path of violence, but sacrificed as bed board for the epileptic pulse of a wayward, infant's heartbeat. Lan Wangji would protest, but Wei Ying falls first prey to their routine, and the hour softens to the gentle, febrile cooing of a child settling in place.
Sizhui might have stood so between them, learning the love of two and not passed as priceless burden between the members of the sect, until Lan Wangji returned to him from gelid confinement. They've stolen too much of him, reimbursed little and late. Now, second chances brokered —
And there's the stink of sulphur and hot stone, of moving, precious water. Grime on his legs, where they fold into finery and silk, blood flaked and crisp, deteriorating. Baths. ]
Yes.
[ An inn, a quarter, a night's succour after. Return tomorrow, when the bodies they unearth from the causeway will want their dues, their rites and their last words, shared. When there will be more than urgency and less than dread between them.
He lifts, sparing Wei Ying barely a nod, then a nudge of their joined hands around the child, and washes his mouth on the rabbit-fine fur, the tip of the creature's nose. Uncle will not want such a guest, but he will take a refugee, and so they will present him. No matter his soul's aches, Lan Qiren has never turned nose or walked away from a harrowed innocent.
But still, as they start the walk, even Lan Wangji must note: ]
...next time, a daughter.
[ Truly. Break pattern. ]
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Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps what this child of misfortune needs is what Gusu Lan provides even to the most fortunate of children, orphans taken in by nostalgia and offered safety in places that claimed impossible was only a state of mind.
Clarity, focus. There are other gifts delivered in the cool clinging fogs of Gusu, by the structured strictures of the Lan. Words like Lan Zhan's, a different kind of code, tip him into laughing, a tired roll of amusement that aches without hurting at all. )
Right, right. A daughter next time. I'll consult with the universe, it should be so kind as to provide.
( A smile, a wink, and the path spilling downward for the resolution of the evening: each step gains momentum if not energy, so that they're closer with each moment to their first safely minded Qingshan. They're welcomed with wide, curious eyes, a woman paid well and given to a sleeping child at her heart, curled up next to a cat, lean and muscled, and an older child minding the fire with the distraction of the young upon their arrival.
Roused from slumber, their waiting son rubs at his eyes, and beams, and holds out his arms: a demand with the sleepy presentation of the not fully awake, lapsing into mumbled complaint at his waking state and a burrowing nuzzle of his head against a collarbone, hidden. Asking after lodgings points toward another inn, one closer, facilities less polished, interiors carefully decorated, and bathing tubs of metal and kept warm through the ingenuity of the mortals not so blessed as to live in cultivation's finer tunings of work. Negotiated, three baths, and the child left in another's care for most the day demanding in increasingly less sleepy turn to come with, such that Wei Wuxian brings his nose to their human son's in a bop and nuzzle before turning his face to Lan Zhan, smiling tired and content, knowing tomorrow's mission and at ease with the straightforwardness of it: )
Do you have room for two?
( To mean: do you have the energy, because I'm happy taking him in for splashes and earnest attempts to scrub both of them clean in one small, dedicated radius before his childish attention span wanders away again. It means the shorter soak; and they now number two who need the time, and Wei Wuxian considers he can probably handle both. Or handle them first, to lay to rest, if Qingshan will cooperate in curling up with their rabbit-child and sleep the sleep of the young and growing. )
I can manage them both first.
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It's Wei Ying who answers him, while fresh accommodations go brokered. Wei Ying, who steps first, Wei Ying who flirts with toil unending, while Lan Wangji's shadow casts long and deep, a respectable distance behind him. Then, amid the fulmination of cloying, clawing incense, in a room far too expectant of a sophisticated traveller's tastes for a seating of the provinces —
...ah. May Lan Wangji suffer the presence of one of his children in the bathtub Arms steeled, he clings to their nameless rabbit son, then only raises his brow and calmly swoops in to wrest Qingshan free of Wei Ying, also. ]
Wei Ying. [ For how often he speaks the name, poison and honey, known and dissolving. Diluting. But granular, patient, seeding and present — humoured, perhaps, to serve reminders of the plain and the established. ] I raised a child.
[ Long years of dread and mourning and sickness and knee scrapes and bruising, when the first brushes with the sword turned an eruption of adolescent discoveries that heroes might win the wars of poetry, but they do not walk from combat of the living world entirely unscathed. That warriors are not born, but scrupulously crafted, and Sizhui, the hold on the hilt is weak, the turn of the calf too tense, the lines of defence too tender, and — there, the first blow bleeds into a wounding, and the boy (turned man) learns.
Perhaps there were nursemaids too, and a loving uncle, a fostering grandmaster. Perhaps a sect volunteered itself to pay the weak, strangled imprecation of a missing master's fatherhood, while he sought chaos in the wake of his soulmate's disaster.
No matter. He lays claim to Lan Sizhui's rearing, one moment and all. He will raise these two sons also, however dubious Wei Ying stands of his care. He pauses only the one moment: ]
Name your third son.
[ Let Wei Ying have his say of the one thing, while Lan Wangji retreats to shed grit and grime and silks for himself and his two children behind the modesty screen. ]
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i like how this is the horniest tag you're getting out of wifi so far
steers this thread back to the righteous salt path
hello wei ying's heavenly pillar................. of salt
i request an adult
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